


Chasing Shadows

by misszeldasayre



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Explicit Language, F/M, Happy Ending, Jedi Rey (Star Wars), Nightmares, Non-Explicit Sex, Pining, Romance, Senator Ben Solo, Skywalker Family Drama (Star Wars), Skywalker Family Feels (Star Wars), Unplanned Pregnancy, Varykino (Star Wars)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-24
Updated: 2020-10-24
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:54:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 26,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27094618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misszeldasayre/pseuds/misszeldasayre
Summary: With his infamous temper and Skywalker heritage, it’s no wonder that Senator Ben Solo becomes the target of two assassination attempts. When Jedi Master Rey is assigned to protect him, they retreat to Naboo’s Lake Country to lay low. Together, Ben and Rey unwind three generations of family secrets that haunt Varykino’s halls while fighting mutual attraction that spins beyond their control.
Relationships: Leia Organa/Han Solo, Padmé Amidala/Anakin Skywalker, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 23
Kudos: 77
Collections: To Rapture the Earth and the Seas: the 2020 Reylo Fanfiction Anthology





	1. Never Peace

_34 ABY_

* * *

When HoloNet News leaks that not one, but two assassination attempts were carried out on Senator Ben Solo’s life, not a single colleague bats an eye. “It only was a matter of time,” Senator Pima Drolley murmurs over Sarlacc kickers after a particularly vitriolic encounter with Solo during that morning’s lunch recess.

“He had it coming,” the Chief of State’s undersecretary giggles as she drafts a memo to the Speaker of the Chandrilian House.

“Frankly,” says the governor of Hanna City, who has been scorched twice over by the temper of her planet’s representative, “I wouldn’t be surprised if he was ambushed again. I’ve worked with thousands of dignitaries, yet I’ve never met one quite as disagreeable as Senator Solo.”

“But he gets shit done,” the governor’s bodyguard reminds her.

“That he does.”

When Leia Organa hears the news—not from her son’s mouth, but from Vice Chancellor Holdo’s hologram—she only rolls her eyes. “He has too much of his father in him to make friends.”

“And too much of Han to get killed off so easily,” Holdo notes. “Rumor has it that he fought off the first attacker with nothing but a datapad.”

She chuckles. “Rumor? Why don’t you ask him directly?” Holdo’s mumbled excuse tells Leia all she needs to know. Ben Solo cuts a fearsome figure, intimidating even Vice Chancellor Holdo, but Leia will be damned if she lets her son continue unprotected.

When his mother turns up on his balcony, the captain of her guard in tow, Ben Solo realizes he’s in for a scolding. Leia does not disappoint.

“That’s what you get for sponsoring the Iridonian refugee bill,” she tells him when he balks at her proposal to protect him from further attacks.

“But you said we had a moral—”

“And for pissing off the Geonosians right before our charity gala, too.” Seasoned in battles fought with both blaster and tongue, Leia cuts off her son and herds him aboard a nondescript transport bound for Naboo. No matter that the Senate is still in session, that his bill that caused so much fuss is finally up for debate. In the face of his mother’s worry and in the shadow of her reach, Ben Solo is reduced to a little boy, spirited away from Hosnian Prime to their secluded family retreat.

The transport is small, only a cockpit and two bays, not even a proper galley in which to prepare food. Leia and the captain of her guard take up one bay, so Ben promptly relocates to the other, where he lounges on a cracked leather couch and bemoans letting the witnesses of the assassination attempt disperse with tongues intact.

Then in walks a woman robed in coarse brown and shades of sand. Her hair, knotted into three buns. Her staff, clutched tightly in one hand. Her lightsaber, belted tight against her waist.

Ben eyes the Jedi Knight from across the transport’s passenger bay, making no effort to hide it. She peers up from her staff, holding his eyes until she’s gleaned some scrap of information that she chooses not to share. When she looks away, Ben shivers.

They continue like this, his steady stare meeting her furtive glances, until Ben stands abruptly. The ceiling bends to kiss his head, but he refuses to hunch as he strides toward the exit. Mere steps from the doorframe, his exit disappears, blocked by this scrawny scrap of a Jedi drowning in borrowed robes.

“Where are you going, Senator?” she demands. Harder than expected and lilting like his mother’s, her voice arrests him midstep.

Briefly he tries to muscle past her, but she doesn’t budge, not even as he looms a breath from her head. “Home.”

She leans into him, her staff blocking his path. Now he’s in danger of tripping over it should he make a break for it. “I’m afraid that’s not possible.”

He’d laugh if his body wasn’t coiled tight, ready to snap. Leave it to Luke to send the most stubborn knight in his temple. Ben can practically see his uncle’s blue eyes gleam. Payback, he’d call it. “I don’t think so.”

“Good thing you’re not the one commanding the ship,” she says, and then she grins, white teeth lined up like stormtroopers in marching formation. Before they disappear, Ben realizes that battle is no abstract concept to her. She travels armed for a fight.

“And you are?”

“Pardon me for interrupting,” a familiar voice chimes in over Ben’s shoulder. “But Madam Jedi is in charge. At least until these dreadful assassins are apprehended.”

“Thanks a lot, Threepio,” he mutters.

“My pleasure, Master Ben.” He swears Threepio sounds gleeful, which sets his head throbbing.

“Where are you going?” the Jedi inquires as Threepio clanks away, rewinding them back to where they began.

“The ‘fresher.” An answer private enough to shake her, if he’s lucky.

But Ben Solo had never been lucky.

“I’ll escort you there.”

“My mother put you up to this.” But he allows her to lead him toward the ‘fresher, even though he could map the ship’s innards in his sleep.

“For the record, droids don’t do sarcasm,” she informs him.

“You don’t say.”

She ignores his grumbles, probably at his mother’s behest, and lengthens her strides to match his punishing pace. If she wants to monitor him, he won’t adapt to accommodate her. As they walk, she pushes back the sleeves of her robe that keep falling over her hands. Ben can’t hold back a scoff. Interesting how her cheeks color at the sound. Perhaps she’s not as unflappable as she hopes to be.

Halting outside as the corridor branches in two, she points to the left. “This way.”

“After you, Madam Jedi.”

“Rey will do,” she says, nodding firmly as she steps in front of him. Her clipped words contradict the familiarity that her first name implies. The briskness compels Ben to test out her name on his tongue.

“Rey.” It tastes dry and light. “Why are you here?”

“To show you to the ‘fresher, Senator Solo. And here it is.” She halts again outside a narrow durasteel door, folding her arms as she waits for him to enter the privy alone. No part of her demeanor hints at humor and yet…

He falters for too long, hung up on the unknowable quantity domineering the transport. She coughs. “After you, Senator.”

Her impertinence prods an unused part of him, rusty and blinking in the sudden light. “No need to follow.”

“Your mother is only paying me to guard you, Senator,” she replies. “I trust you can take care of the rest.” Then she whirls on her heel, ramrod straight and radiating severity as she surveys the hall and leaves him to his business. He refuses to speak on their walk back to the bay. Her boots squeak against the floor and the curious row of three buns parading down her neck bob as she leads Ben back to the cracked leather couch and resumes her post. He doesn’t look at her until his mother enters the bay.

When Leia arrives, flanked by the captain of her personal guard, Rey stiffens and bows at the waist, but the senior senator waves her off. As Leia surveys the room, her gaze lingers on the Jedi’s rigid avoidance and her son’s hunched shoulders.

“I see you’ve met,” she says dryly. “Excellent.”

“Indeed,” Ben hisses. If his childish vitriol amuses Rey, she doesn’t show it, but Leia chuckles.

“He’s quite the charmer,” she says to Rey, leaning in confidentially. The girl flushes, eyes darting everywhere but Ben. “Takes after his father.”

It always comes back to karking Han Solo. Now Rey looks up, taking in every inch of her ward as though trying to assess what parts of him belong to the infamous Rebellion hero. Across the galaxy they praise Han’s heroics. Ben can’t hear the praise without hearing slamming doors and hushed shouts, without seeing the Falcon take flight night after night. Would that he could remake himself in the image of someone not his father, nor his mother, his own person with no family name to weigh against his reputation.

Rey inventories him, weighs him, and swallows whatever conclusion she gathers. After that, she turns to Leia. “I still need to brief Senator Solo on the protocol once we land,” she explains.

Another wave from Leia to disperse the formalities. “There are a few more hours until arrival. How about a game of Dejarik?” Caught in her employer’s tractor beam smile, Rey finds herself plopped down on the bench as Leia fires up the board. Ben doesn’t budge, watching the whole process behind folded arms.

“Why don’t you join us, Ben?” His mother’s thinly-veiled command, accompanied by her customary scowl, prompts Ben to calculate the distance from the holochess board to the nearest escape pod. Not close enough. He sits when she clears her throat, a sign that any refusal won’t end well for him.

Once he joins Leia at the board, she sweeps up and away, murmuring excuses about checking on the pilot and leaving him captive in the Jedi’s care.

* * *

The flight from Hosnian Prime to Naboo is seven standard hours. Ben could fly the route blindfolded. Instead he’s trapped in a Dejarik game with a Jedi who never bothered to learn the rules. She chews her lip between every move; at the rate she plays, with all the swiftness of a moisture farmer’s landspeeder, Ben marvels that she hasn’t drawn blood.

“I’ll stun your Ng’ok with my Grimtaash—”

“That’s your Monnok.”

“Oh.” For all of her bravado over the ‘fresher, Rey shrinks at the holochess table. Ben almost feels sorry for her, the way every move sounds like a question.

“You don’t play much.” As he says it, he hears his mother’s voice in his mind: _People find it off-putting when you do that. Do what? Make observations._

“Never, actually,” she confesses.

“You’re too busy at the temple.”

“Actually, I don’t have the patience for strategy.”

He sighs, summoning his own Monnok to remove her Houjix from the board. “But my uncle entrusted my care to you.”

“When I spend all day strategizing, it takes the fun out of games.”

“What strategizing?”

“Diplomacy. Hostage negotiations. Guarding ill-tempered senators.”

When a smile escapes him, he doesn’t miss her face lighting up in response. “I see. But playing strategy games with ill-tempered senators…”

“Makes me regret taking this mission.”

“You had a choice?” he asks, startled. So much of the Jedi Order is duty and honor, at least according to Luke. He never imagined choice factored into their operations.

“Without choice, we’re no better than slaves.”

“So you chose to guard me.”

“In a manner of speaking.” She dodges his probing more deftly than his holomonsters, losing her Kintan Strider while stoking his curiosity. “Luke asked for a favor. Who am I to refuse my old master?”

“Of course he trained you.” Passed along his aptitude for Dejarik, too. Ben’s Ng’ok launches a double attack that demolishes her K’lor’slug. His remaining holomonsters cheer victoriously as the slug’s holographic body thuds to the board. Rey only shrugs.

“Another?” she offers unenthusiastically. As if he would willingly choose to suffer through another drawn-out match. Her forehead smooths as he shakes his head, powering down the chessboard instead. She coughs; he stretches and catches her eyeing the hem of his tunic as it rises. Her flush suffuses the whole room with the heat of twin suns, and Ben finds that he doesn’t mind the temperature.

“Why become a Jedi?”

“What?” she asks, startled from a reverie he hadn’t noticed her slip into.

“Why follow an ancient, dying code? Why spend your life running errands for my uncle?”

“You mean protecting the galaxy?” She pivots abruptly, advancing on him. “Your tongue has quite the reputation, Senator. Couldn’t you accomplish more through civility?”

He longs to tell her just where she can stick her head, but saying so would only prove her point, and she’s the first person to ask him this without judgment flavoring her tone. So he replies honestly, maybe because she actually cares to hear it. “What’s my last name?”

“Solo.” Judging by the wrinkle of her nose, she must think he’s screwing with her.

“Solo,” he repeats. “The son of a smuggler-turned-hero and the New Alderaniaan senator. The grandson of Darth Vader. Skywalker, Organa, Solo. They think they’ve figured me out by the scent of my blood.”

“So you make yourself new.”

“And watch them wriggle at the sight.”

She doesn’t wriggle, not when he admits this nor when he challenges her to another game of Dejarik because he fears the turn their conversation has taken. She still nibbles her lip every time she moves a piece, but she kills his Grimtaash before it can stun her team and tears down his Ghhhk with grim satisfaction. A fast learner. The game is over before Ben can blink, and he begins to understand why Luke likes her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to [ politicalmamaduck](https://archiveofourown.org/users/politicalmamaduck/pseuds/politicalmamaduck) and [ Vivien](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vivien) for editing this piece, inspired by Tom Stoppard's play, [ Arcadia ](https://theliterat.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/arcadia.pdf).
> 
> If you enjoy this fic, consider reading the other amazing stories in the [ 2020 Reylo Fanfiction Anthology: To Rapture the Earth and Seas](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/RFFAToRapturetheEarthandtheSeas/works). :)
> 
> If you want to listen along to the songs that inspired this story (one per chapter), here's a [ playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4N7IcVKxklByIL32NwOkJC?si=2p4fWttcTUaXfrFSTHZ-iQ) for you to enjoy.
> 
> Lastly, this stunning [ moodboard](https://reylofanfictionanthology.tumblr.com/post/629914056337375232/coming-soon-to-the-reylo-fanfiction-anthology-an), made by politicalmamaduck, captures the vibe of this piece perfectly--check it out!


	2. No Compasses

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ben grows increasingly curious about his Jedi protector.

_34 ABY_

* * *

The transport touches down on Naboo sooner than Ben would prefer, though he’d never acknowledge it as he sweeps from the ship onto Varykino’s dock. A thick mugginess envelopes him, searching out his form under his black cloak, an unexpected reminder of home. His Jedi guard shifts uncomfortably when she steps off the ship, eyeing the water with wide eyes and a hunger Ben discerns from halfway down the dock.

Rey doesn’t speak to him, not on the slow walk to the estate verandah, not as the ancient caretaker totters out to greet the party and escort them to their chambers. Ben glances at his protector as often as he can manage until his mother fixes him with an all-too perceptive stare. He won’t let Leia catch him staring again.

Although he hasn’t vacationed here in ages, Ben’s feet remember the airy corridors without prompting from Old Nandi, who continues to lead the party at a glacial pace. This frees him to watch Rey take in the grandeur of his family’s summer home. Her moon-round eyes and hollowed cheeks betray a faint longing that Ben tastes in her wake.

For as long as Ben remembers, his parents would sleep in the biggest suite, its balcony hanging low over the lake. “Senator Organa,” Old Nandi wheezes as she pushes open the heavy kriin-wood door to the suite. But as Han stopped visiting Varykino, his mother stopped entering the room without sighing. So the room became Ben’s, just as her subtle melancholy became his to bear, too, every time they walked beside the water.

He hates his father for many things, Varykino included. 

True to form, Leia waves Ben toward her former chamber. “It’s much too big for me.” Then she surprises him by waving Rey forward, too. The Jedi protests, but the political machine that is Leia Organa bustles past her concerns. “Take the room connected to Ben’s suite. You’ll need to be close should there be another attack.”

With the glare Rey shoots him, Ben worries the Jedi has half a mind to initiate the next attempt on his life herself, if only to free them from their close quarters. But she nods, obedience smothering the fiery flash until placid Jedi acceptance crystallizes into a mask. “Whatever you think best, Senators.”

It doesn’t take her long to move into the adjoining room from the looks of the small pack slung over her back and the speed with which she bounds for the door after Leia leaves.

“Rey,” Ben calls, scrambling for a reason to hold her here. Family ghosts would make for insufficient company. After watching her composure crack during Dejarik, he wants present riddles rather than ghosts from the past. Or maybe he doesn’t want to be alone.

She cocks her head, but doesn’t walk out. They stare at each other; eventually she speaks. “Strange how wet the air is here.”

“It’s Naboo.”

“Naboo is new territory for me,” she admits. “I’ve never seen so much green.”

The stubby potted trees lining the estate shrivel in comparison to the lush fields surrounding the lake. Ben’s parents used to drag him through those fields in the name of family bonding. Although he usually avoids them since Han doesn’t visit anymore, Ben wonders how Rey would react to greenery as far as the eye can see. “Join me on a walk,” he says, his lungs refusing to expand until she agrees.

As they depart the villa, Ben intends to keep quiet. No sense in disturbing their fragile peace. But she pulls words from him without trying. They pass the ballroom, the stables, the crumbling caretaker’s cottage before Ben realizes they’ve gotten into it again, discussing the circumstances that have drawn them together.

Interactions with his uncle’s knights have convinced Ben that Jedi steady their passions, stifling them rather than allowing them to overpower their senses. Luke’s sharp tongue and bright eyes often remain the only indication of the man beneath his robes. Although Rey trained under his tutelage, she bears none of his acerbic restraint. From her buoyant strides to her rapid speech, she expends energy. Conservation is not in her blood.

The trimmed lawns and stone pathways give way to grass swaying in the breeze, tickling their thighs as they forge ahead. In the distance, water burbles. Overhead, pelikki chirp and next to him, Rey keeps sneaking glances at his frame when she thinks he won’t notice. Though it should irritate him—paralyze him—he can’t bring himself to mind.

When she inquires about the bill that almost got himself killed, he doesn’t grow angry. Her barefaced curiosity refreshes him after the political grime that coats every interaction with his colleagues. With her, there is no intrigue. No hidden agenda. No scores to settle with ancient family names.

So he entertains her questions and responds honestly, telling her about the Zabrak refugees pouring into neighboring star systems that already struggle to support their native populations, about the Senators representing wealthier planets who refuse to share their bounty, about the weeks-long gridlock that repeatedly delays his bill’s passage.

“But you know this already,” he says by way of apology once he realizes how much he’s spoken without interruption.

To his surprise, Rey shakes her head. “They say that in the New Republic, Jedi used to intervene in political squabbles.”

Ben nods. He’s heard the legends. “They kept the peace.”

“In the past. We don’t do much of that anymore. Master Luke believes such interactions left the Jedi vulnerable to outside influence. But hearing what you say… I wonder how we can justify our neutrality.”

The edge in Ben’s chuckle reveals his hand: a man fed up with neutrality, all too familiar with his uncle’s tired theories. He’s listened to the lectures a dozen times, argued them point by point, to his mother’s pride and his father’s amusement. Although he can’t remember being quite so fascinated with their source. So he urges her onward. “What else does Master Luke believe?”

She stops walking, turning to surveil him as if she can’t quite make out his face despite the midday sun beating down on their brows. “Surely you’ve already heard this. He’s your uncle.”

He dismisses her perception. “Humor me.”

Again she hesitates before resuming their journey, her strides picking up speed along with her voice. “Well, you remember that Master Luke teaches the Force will equalize us all.”

“Will it?”

“He says it’s written in the way everything interacts on a molecular level. When matter collides, it transfers energy.”

“The Force.” A clear enough answer, especially after suffering through years of his uncle’s lectures. To Ben’s surprise, however, Rey contradicts him. From her, he should expect nothing less.

“No, the Force ties living beings together. This is smaller, more fundamental. Particles transfer energy upon contact and generate heat in the process. But some heat can’t be transferred. It gets lost.”

“Hm.” Her knowledge, however rudimentary, surprises him, but he holds his tongue and lets her keep talking. On the misty horizon the waterfalls take shape, building from a hum to a whispered thunder. How much Rey notices them, Ben can’t tell, because her focus remains lasered in on the topic at hand.

“It stands to reason that if particles keep colliding, sharing energy, and losing heat, those losses will add up. Luke believes that one day, the particles will have no more energy left to share. There will be no more heat to power collisions, nor cold to distribute, just random movement. A balance.”

Ben’s heard this same speech a thousand times, but never delivered by such a curious creature. The concept is the same; he shouldn’t hang on each word. Yet every fiber of his being screams in protest at the thought of her molecules dissolving into sameness, condemned to collide as randomly as their lives did hours prior.

He notes the doubt in Rey’s recitation, the words an ill-fitting tunic hanging loose on her form. So he probes the fault line. “You don’t agree.”

“No, I—well…” Her stutter is suffused with the shame of a child caught sneaking sweet-sand cookies at bedtime. “Master Luke has studied the universe longer than I’ve lived. Who am I to question his wisdom?”

 _Nobody._ Ben pushes down the thought as fast as it infiltrates his head. Already he fears shutting her down, losing her warmth. “Luke is a foolish old man.”

“Senator!” she exclaims, almost tripping over her scuffed boots and stumbling into his path. He reaches out a hand to steady her, but she deliberately avoids it. Still their shoulders almost brush with each step, parallel trajectories wrenched together by invisible strings. “You can’t say that.”

“You’re in no position to dictate.”

He half-expects her to stutter a chagrined apology, or flush redder than a Tatooine sandstorm, like any Senator with a modicum of self-preservation might do. Instead she digs in, so he basks in her flame.

“He may be your uncle, but he was my master. I won’t stand by while you bring family politics into this.”

“You do disagree with him!”

Rolling her eyes, Rey speeds up and pulls away from him. He makes no effort to match her pace, though he could easily close the distance. It forces her to call over her shoulder, poorly masking her irritation. “The Jedi don’t have to agree on everything. Many of our beliefs align. Some are open to interpretation. Unlike the certainty your beloved Senate craves, we rely on faith. We don’t pretend to know the workings of the galaxy, only the workings of the Force.”

“You suspect it operates differently than Luke thinks.”

“I do,” she says stiffly.

Ben crows a silent victory and forges onward. “You can’t bear the thought of a world in chaos. It goes against everything you know.”

“I am quite accustomed to chaos, Senator.” Her clipped words close him out as the grass squishes wetly underfoot and waterfalls soar before them. Then all of her frustration drains as she registers the pounding water, the distant marble-flecked mountains, the mist skimming their cheeks. “Oh,” she says, eyes widening greedily.

As she drinks in the falls, Ben drinks in her awe, worth every step of the journey. As soon as she catches him watching her, she reddens. “You must be used to this,” she says, not an apology, but envy.

“Every time I visit, it still takes my breath away.” And it does, the last time as he yelled at his invisible father, letting the falls wash clean his anger, and this time as he relishes Rey’s appreciation.

“So green,” she repeats, hushed enough that Ben wonders if the words slipped from her thoughts unbidden.

“A desert planet,” he says once they’ve sprawled comfortably in a dry patch of grass near the falls. “You’re from a desert planet.”

“Luke told you!”

The accusation tugs a smile from Ben, but he shakes his head. “People from worlds like Chandrila don’t say that. Green is ordinary to us.”

“You must love it there,” she sighs, and Ben doesn’t correct her. It takes too much effort to wrestle the beautiful and ugly parts of Chandrila—its people, landscapes, and government—into a neat enough package to share with Rey. All of his effort right now is focused on maintaining the thin gap between their shoulders.

“Maybe,” he says, leaning back on his elbows. “Maybe.”


	3. A Secret Language

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ben and Rey discover a secret.

_34 ABY_

* * *

For the seventh time during dinner that evening Ben contemplates leaping from the windows of the Room of Morning Mists and plunging into the lake below. For the seventh time, he squashes the impulse by ripping into a shuura. His teeth tear the fruit’s skin, dribbling juice down his chin. He should wipe it up, but his mother’s pursed lips urge him to take another bite.

Earlier that evening, when Old Nandi summoned him to dinner, he smoothed his jacket lapel and ran a hand through his hair once more before following her to the dining hall. His shoes, newly polished, squeaked nervously, echoing off the high gleaming ceilings. Something in Rey’s smile upon returning from their afternoon walk to the waterfalls helped Ben feel lighter than he had in several moon cycles.

Unlike political affairs that left Ben monitoring his chrono too frequently to be polite, this afternoon walk left him hungering for more time to speak with his bodyguard. Against all odds, he wondered if she felt the same. He hoped his lonely imagination hadn’t conjured up her soft huff of displeasure as they had to part on the terrace, Rey dashing off to join the captain of Leia’s guard in reviewing security protocols to secure the villa overnight.

Maybe the jacket and shoes were too much. His stomach swooped, forging new flight paths across his gut as the Room of Morning Mists loomed remotely. If second-guessing himself was second-nature, second-guessing himself over a near-stranger was piloting a speeder at six years old, his father shouting directions in his ear that didn’t translate down his hands and into the controls.

His stomach bottomed out as he entered the dining hall to find his mother seated at a table set for two. She raised her brows, then grinned slyly as she took in his unusual ensemble. “For me?” No response could salvage his dignity, so Ben resigned himself to a lengthy dinner.

Now his mother’s knowing smirks and Old Nandi’s prattle have pinned him to his chair for the better part of a standard hour. Desperation persuades him to drain his glass of Andoan wine twice over, thirsty for escape.

Dessert’s arrival provides the perfect excuse for Ben to throw down his unused napkin and stalk to his room, muttering about an upset stomach. It’s no lie; the anticipatory butterflies have spoiled. Craving space, he closes the distance between the dining hall and his room in half the time it took him behind Nandi’s tottering gait. Soon he flings open his door, the last unopened bottle of wine from dinner clutched in his hands, and shrugs out of his jacket once his feet cross the threshold. He closes his aching eyes, sets down the wine on the battered mahogany writing desk, and basks in the evening breeze streaming through the open balcony door. Funny, he doesn’t remember opening it before leaving. But his mind has been otherwise occupied on futile pursuits.

Head swimming, he nearly hisses in pleasure when he kicks off those freshly polished shoes. Alone at last.

“Senator Solo!”

Not quite.

Crouching on the balcony, clutching a glowrod in the dimming twilight, Rey freezes as the door slams shut and Ben advances on her.

“You missed dinner,” he snaps, flinging his jacket onto the desk chair’s back. It slips, an inky stain pooling between them on the bedroom floor. Finally, agonizingly, she straightens from her crouch, stowing the glowrod in her robe and closing the balcony door behind her. Ben hopes she can’t hear his galloping pulse, a herd of fathiers stampeding through his veins.

“Protecting you,” she snaps back.

“By leaving me to dine alone with my mother.” He sounds like a petulant child. He hates himself for it.

As fast as it dawned, her frustration fades to wry amusement, leaving Ben to feel like the intruder. “Forgive me, Senator Solo. Here I am trying to secure every entrance to your chambers against potential assassins and the real threat all along was your mother.”

When Ben splutters, Rey simply shrugs. “She did kidnap you.”

“Now you notice.” Against his better instincts, hope takes to the skies anew, piloting his heart into his throat. After he spent so much time hoping to converse with her over a meal, they are alone. His limbs dangle awkwardly; he can’t decide whether to sit or stand. She hovers by the closed balcony doors, unwilling to leave the perimeter and step closer to his orbit.

“I suppose I should thank you for your intrusion,” he begins after lapsing into strained silence, so different from their companionable hike only this afternoon.

“Intruding on official Jedi business!” Her hands land on her hips. Wisps of hair escape the three buns and stick to her forehead in the late summer heat. Sweltering though it may be, she wears her coarse woolen robe without complaint.

“Then I must thank you for your service.” To his surprise, she flushes from neck to ears as he holds up the stolen bottle.

“That’s unnecessary—”

“Rey,” he says, suddenly uncertain when he sees how she softens at her name. “Join me.”

She hesitates, lip caught on teeth, battling between duty and courtesy. “One glass,” she says. “No more. I can’t compromise my post.”

“You’ll be watching tonight?” he asks, discovering that the idea doesn’t rankle him like it would have earlier this morning.

She nods, indicating her adjacent chamber. “From the next room.” Only a thin wall away.

Ben gulps. He busies himself with breaking the wine bottle’s seal, then stops at the cork with a swear borrowed from his father.

“No corkscrew?”

Her amusement doesn’t irritate him, not truly. “I was in a hurry.”

“That’s right, trapped at dinner with your mother.” But she pushes off the wall, making her way over to him. As she peers over him, he can smell the citrus and sunshine in her hair. 

Already regretting his invitation, he scowls. “Can you open this?”

“With my Jedi mind tricks?”

Finally he allows a smile. “I expect nothing less.”

“Prepare to believe,” she warns, plucking the bottle from his grasp and shooing him back with great flaps of her robed sleeves. Then she reaches into her robe, patting around for longer than necessary. Part of the show, Ben assumes, until she too borrows Han’s favorite curse. “Must’ve fallen out…” she huffs, before throwing open desk drawers at random and sifting through the contents impatiently. “Are there no knives in Varykino?”

Surely he imagines the sour note, the yearning it conceals, as she invokes his ancestral home. For a Jedi with no attachments, Rey seems tethered to phantoms Ben can’t conjure simply by prodding her. Not that he’ll stop trying. To satisfy his detached interest, of course, not because he cares about the threads binding together her universe.

“The ‘fresher,” he says. “On the sink.”

Before he gets the words out, she marches toward the ‘fresher. “Why didn’t you say so?” In her customary haste to acquire the knife, Rey leaves the desk drawers ajar. As Ben reaches to close them one by one, a hint of silver gleams from the bottom drawer in the candlelight. Buried under stacks of yellowing papers: an silver flask, dented and tarnished, but heavy between Ben’s fingers as he picks it up. The monogrammed initials “HS” wink at him as he flips it over.

So his father’s presence still lingers here, even though Han refuses to set foot in the villa anymore, no matter how much he grew to love the lake. The silver is too heavy, the monogrammed script too delicate, for him to have purchased the flask himself. Maybe a gift from Leia, a relic that survived their marriage. Predictably the flask is empty. Though Han might not have purchased it, he would have made damn sure to drain it. A quick sniff and Ben decides to reappropriate it as a glass for tonight. Sharing a bottle with the Jedi, tasting traces of her lips on the rim, wouldn’t do. Not when he’s already a few cups deeper than he prefers to venture. He must summon every ounce of control. So he brandishes the flask like armor when she returns with the knife.

Hastily she wrestles with cork and knife. Methodically he sifts through the drawers as he continues to close them one by one. A wrinkled contract promising starspeeder fuel deliveries every month, paid in full at the time of purchase, dated a year before his mother’s birth. A fraying handkerchief embroidered with the Naberrie crest. A crumpled pink fizzer-sweet wrapper.

He pauses when he brushes something smooth and pulls out a caramel leather-bound folio, wrapped in leather cord and stuffed with pages. Gingerly he unwinds the cord. Documents burst from the confines of the folio. Ben recognizes the New Republic seal atop what appears to be a hand-drafted resolution; the Naberrie crest again, this time embossed on cream stationary; a handful of slitted envelopes, some addressed to the late Senator Amidala, others addressed plainly to Padmé. Beneath the loose leaves, he finds pages bound to the folio and filled with a thin, elegant script.

Distantly a cork pops. Wine sloshes. Rey grunts.

“Look.” He gestures at the pages spread across the battered writing desk. As Rey abandons the wine and approaches him, his stomach stalls mid-flight. Not from her proximity as she peers over his shoulder, but from the weight of the discovery settling around his shoulders. Something unfamiliar tugs at the webbing between the journal and his soul.

“What, a record book?”

“No, it’s something else,” he murmurs. “My grandmother’s diary.” He points to the inscription gracing the first bound page: Padmé Amidala Naberrie.

She folds her arms skeptically. “Senator Amidala’s private diary, lost for the last fifty years in a drawer in your mother’s vacation retreat?”

“Can’t you feel it?”

“Feel what?” she snarls, as if he was trying to be obstinate. But she glances around the room when she thinks he won’t notice. Surely she must sense it… but confusion lingers in her pinched forehead.

“You can’t, can you?” Ben should gloat, but his curiosity leaves no place for smug satisfaction. “Interesting. This used to be Padmé’s room, too.”

“Where does it say that?” Years of Jedi training do little to quell her growing frustration as she rifles through the book.

“I just know it.”

“Nothing to back up your hunch, Senator?” Between her teeth, his title grows barbs, yet he doesn’t mind its sting.

“Trusting feelings is the Jedi way.”

“You know nothing about the Jedi way!”

The tips of his ears ignite. Suddenly grateful for the high black collars he wears to spite his mother, Ben refuses to turn away from Rey’s frown. He stares until she grabs the folio and sinks onto the bed’s edge. Paper and feathers rustle in tandem, intriguing him further. But he stays still, unmoving save for the folding of his arms.

“Senator…” Rey glances up from the journal, but Ben refuses to engage, following the ornate quilt’s seams as they curve toward her body. “Ben, look.”

Such a rare occurrence, his name from her mouth. He acquiesces, approaching her side and reaching for the book. Their fingertips almost collide. He jerks away, a starship from an asteroid, not sure if they could survive the impact.

Rey points at the date and location scribbled atop the entry. “Before the Clone Wars, she came here.”

“She came here often,” Ben replies absently, recycling his mother’s words as his own. “Every summer with her family.”

Rey’s protracted sigh demands Ben’s attention. “Yes, but all the previous entries were written on Coruscant during the spring legislative session. Something abnormal drew her out here.”

“Perhaps,” he says, staring at his grandmother’s journal, not at the heading but at a short entry near the bottom of the page. In a faint, thin script, her words send ice shivering down his spine: _He will destroy me._


	4. Undone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Padmé wrestles with her attraction to Anakin.

_22 BBY_

* * *

Their beds are separated by the thinnest of walls. Padmé discovers this after Anakin’s fingertips wend their way up her back, after she stares a beat too long and breaks away from his kiss a moment too late. She’s quartered in her childhood summer bedroom, Anakin in the nurse’s chamber adjacent to her own. For her safety, he declares, so young Teckla Minnau shows him to the room faster than Padmé can object.

On the first night of their stay, Padmé cracks her journal’s spine and writes till the ink seeps from the pages to her palms. A tradition since girlhood, older than crown and state, it brings her comfort. It allows her to think. Through a coronation and a war, a Senate appointment and an assassination attempt, she seeks refuge by filling pages that withhold judgment. Were there the chance of someone else reading it, she’d burn the diary, forfeiting her refuge to protect her privacy. Yet within Varykino’s walls, she is safe to remove her titles and just be Padmé.

Tonight she writes of fear and cloaked passage to her family’s retreat. Tonight she writes of a Jedi escort, both boyish and mature, calm and covetous. She falls asleep dreaming of stars spinning out of control and winking black in the distant skies overhead.

The next evening she dons a cape blacker than her dreams and a circlet that gleams like those stars. Her dress fits tight, and Anakin’s scrutiny does nothing to dampen the hunger tunneling through her. At dinner, he slices fruit which she spears it with a fork glinting in the sunset. Padmé is home, yet home has never felt so unpredictable.

Even the wind knifing through the sunset’s glow feels different to Padmé. It propels her and Anakin from the dining terrace with its open doors to the fireplace. For a while they talk of speeders and diplomacy, Jedi masters and childhood daydreams, but then the words run out and they’re left tracking the firelight flickering across each other’s faces.

When Anakin breaks the silence with his declaration that she is in his soul, Padmé chokes it all back: glee, confusion, terror, relief. She thinks of duty as he swears to do anything she asks, remembers the constituents she promised to protect as he begs her to share in his suffering, traces the leather lines of his Jedi garb as she warns him of a place they cannot go.

She leaps from the sofa, turning her back to the fire, but cannot shake the impending cold. He follows her, hope brightening his features, until all she can see is a nine-year-old slave clamoring to race through the desert. He would trade their hard-earned freedom for feelings born from a vision polished gold by memory. He has outlined her silhouette so many times in his imagination that it is smooth as japor under his palms and insubstantial as the flames.

He pins her to the wall with a stare. She ought to protest—he has no right to gaze with such heat, such hunger, the barest flicker of a smile playing across his lips as she wriggles under his scrutiny. She ought to protest, but then he might scowl and leave her in the cold. So she stares back, unsure of what he’ll find in her eyes.

Outside, darkness has smothered the sun and cloaked the lake, rendering invisible the hills on the horizon. Waves splash against the weathered stone dock below. Varykino, in all its familiarity, has never felt so foreign as it feels now, shrouded in black, the water and a Jedi waiting to swallow Padmé whole.

As the fire dwindles to coals and her head lolls against the couch, Padmé finds herself cradled in Anakin’s arms as he carries her to bed, inhaling in time to his heart’s two-step thrum. Onward, it beats, onward.

They have dedicated their lives to bringing order to the galaxy through politics and peacekeeping. The Jedi Order is built upon order; the Senate desperately needs it to maintain its power. There are structures that govern their roles, their interactions, their attachments. Pretending otherwise would be as foolish as counting every sand grain on Tatooine. Yet Anakin’s vows and Padmé’s position dwindle in importance as his hand grazes her cheek. She cannot tear herself from his hand and the havoc it wreaks on their tandem heartbeats.

He lays her body atop her bed after turning down the sheets so tenderly that her breath catches. When his back stiffens at the door, Padmé knows he has heard. He pauses, torchlight from the hall limning his Padawan braid gold. She almost whispers his name, anything to call him back, spin him around and strip him bare until they’re nothing but skin and bones, and one shared breath weaving their broken bodies together like sinew.

The next morning she wakes and writes till her hand aches and her fingertips stain ink-black. Her journal’s caramel leather spine bows under her pen, its pages nearly ripping with each stroke. But she continues writing with unusual haste, the distinct sensation pressing into her mind that if she doesn’t get it all out onto paper, she won’t ever be able to let it go.

He joins her at breakfast, the picture of serenity as he strides across the veranda, all clean robes and guarded nods. She has scrubbed the ink from her hands so vigorously that her palms glow an angry red. When she cuts him a slab of hearty bread, his terse thanks is the only indication that he notices her raw skin. His mouth twitches, fighting down words that Padmé catches herself craving to hear.

All day, the kiss he called a scar sprawls between them, lounging in their silence that rolls off the lake like fog. It pushes them to the edges of paths rambling through Varykino’s lush gardens, presses them against opposite sides of the dining table, and drives Anakin to pace next to the fireplace as Padmé perches uneasily on the couch. Duty compels him to stay an arm’s length away from her side at all times, but the stilted silence is all Anakin. She has hurt him, and he cannot forgive her, ever the petulant child born from sand and sun.

Again she dozes at the fireside, and again Anakin carries her from couch to bed before retreating to his neighboring quarters, but not before Padmé clings to his robes as he lays her down. She doesn’t dare slacken her grip, so he sits beside her and rubs molten circles into the small of her back. Under his touch, her skin burns hungrily and her breathing grows ragged.

He leaves then, and as Padmé hears a frustrated growl escape his throat moments later, she remembers how thin the wall is that separates their chambers. So she props herself up, lighting a candle and reaching for her inkwell, already half-empty from this morning’s scribblings. She has more to analyze, and therefore more to write. Yet how to begin? How to sum up a thousand shared glances and the loss of heat when Anakin’s fingers caressed her back goodbye?

Dipping her pen into the jar, she writes: _He will destroy me._


	5. Open Wounds

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ben and Rey dig deeper into the journal and Padmé's relationship with Anakin.

_34 ABY_

* * *

Reluctant to part with the journal though he may be, Ben hands it to Rey at breakfast the next morning. With his mother off to Theed to meet with Naboo’s queen, an uninterrupted day stretches ahead of Ben, including a mystery to fill it. Stifling a yawn, he pours himself a second cup of naris-bud tea in an attempt to mitigate the damage of his sleepless night as Rey pores over the yellowed pages. As she reads, curl falls loose from her buns. Ben fights the urge to push it back from her forehead, wondering if she senses flickers of motion from his fingers—reaching even from his fists.

The sun crawls behind the twisted trees overhanging the terrace before Rey reaches for his arm. Under her touch Ben nearly leaps out of his chair, forcing his mouth to stay steady. No one has touched him like that for so long.

“Listen,” she says, as if he doesn’t hang on her every word. “She’s writing about Luke and your mother. ‘ _I feel them. I know they’re here._ ’”

“You weren’t surprised yesterday. When I told you Padmé is my grandmother.” Her silence confirms his suspicions. “Luke.”

She nods. “The whole galaxy knows Darth Vader fathered twins.”

A lifetime of apprehensive glances floods Ben’s mind, covert whispers and overt sneers cloaked in senatorial robes and shrouded in alliances that invariably leave him the odd man out from Chandrila, with a heritage to fear.

Grounding him, Rey’s voice breaks through his memories. “But they don’t know who bore his children.”

“So the entire Jedi temple knows.”

“Just me.”

“Ah,” he snipes. “The favorite apprentice.”

Her steely frown pierces through his jealousy. “Wrong. Years ago, I was making a fuss unbecoming of a Jedi. I wanted to know my family. Master Luke reminded me some secrets are better left undiscovered.”

Her vulnerability leaves Ben searching for something true to offer up in apology. “The Republic still sees Vader’s shadow in me,” he says. “A monster.”

His heart splinters a fraction wider when she makes no move to deny it. “They fear Darth Vader and worship Queen Amidala, but they don’t know them together. No one has, until now.” Her fingertips drum against the journal, a staccato accompaniment to the slurp of his tea. “Don’t you feel it? Finding the journal was the will of the Force.”

“Perhaps.” The hesitation reveals his skepticism, but she pays it no attention.

“Haven’t you longed to learn about the woman behind the crown? The man behind the mask? Now you can.” Her next words are almost swallowed by the teacup’s rim. “I’d give anything to know more about my family.”

A polite man wouldn’t push, but Ben is no such man. “The Order is your family.”

Her cup angrily rattles in its saucer. “Knowledge is not attachment.”

“Wanting is.” Watching her fury build alongside a blush, Ben discovers the Jedi is no stranger to desire.

She squints as if she can’t quite make him out. “Are you always like this?”

“Like what?”

Her laughter peals, molten sunshine in Ben’s ears. He can’t help but chuckle, too. Sun peeks through the terrace trees. A pelikki caws over the water. Water ripples steadily at the shore below. Hosnian Prime is a remote memory, eclipsed by a diary and the woman dining at his side.

He reaches for the journal, rifling to a particular entry that has haunted him all morning. “Have you seen this entry about the bread and jam? After they married—”

“You don’t know they’re married,” Rey counters. “Why do you think so?”

Because Ben and Rey have bread and jam on their plates beside muja fruit and porridge, he knows the meal to be as common in Naboo as Gungans in swamps. But he also remembers witnessing a similar tradition at several Nabooian weddings that his mother dragged him to each summer at the lake. Which is also how he knows that for Padmé to write about it, it must have meant something more than a meal. The start of a shared life.

He can’t explain why, but he has— “A hunch.”

“A feeling.” She hums in approval. “The Force.”

That stops him momentarily; he sips his cooling tea in a bid to dismiss such nonsense. Then he remembers his dinner escort from the previous night. “My mother says Anakin created C-3PO.”

Rey’s mouth falls open. “C-3PO must’ve known Padmé. He must’ve seen them together! He could fill the journal’s gaps.”

“Maybe.” The promise of answers barely out of reach tantalizes him more than the untouched porridge in his bowl, but Ben forces himself to swallow lukewarm spoonful after spoonful before they set out to find Threepio. If he could uncover the ancestral specters forever looming over his shoulders, he’d eat the whole kriffing bowl of anoat oats, and Rey’s bowl, too.

It spills out between bites, more fanciful than he’s allowed himself to indulge in years: “If only the Jedi could turn back time.”

“Foolishness! We can’t go back.” Rey spoons a heap of Endor jam into her porridge. It camps atop the oats, a bloody smudge until she stirs it in. The red smear spreads, overtaking the creamy porridge. “Time can’t run backwards. It marches on from disorder to disorder. Think of the past and the present as my porridge and jam. Two separate entities stirred together. You can’t separate them again.”

Ben moves to interrupt her, but she only smiles sadder than he’s seen. “No matter how hard you try. No matter how much you long for the past. Not even the Force could distill this mixture back to a bowlful of oats and a spoonful of jam.”

He’d reach for her right then—Jedi code be damned—but her palm cradles the spoon, brings it to her lips, and trembles as she sets it down.

When he catches Rey eyeing him over her bowl, something fizzles deep within his belly. Contentment spreads thick through him like the jam staining her porridge. He doesn’t know what to say, and for once in Ben Solo’s kriffing life, he doesn’t force the words to come. He simply spoons the last of the jam into his bowl, ignoring Rey’s sniff when she finds the jar empty.

* * *

They find C-3PO tottering around the great hall, tapping at a datapad and directing servants as they drape tables in thick blue linens. “I’m afraid Mistress Leia will be in Theed until dinner,” he says when Ben and Rey approach him.

“Good.” Ben smiles grimly. “What do you know about my grandfather?”

“Master Anakin? Why, I don’t think we should discuss him here of all places.”

“Look, Threepio, we have one question. Did he marry Padmé?”

The droid’s golden head swivels nervously. “Did your mother tell you that?”

“Threepio,” Ben growls. “Help us out.”

“I’m only an interpreter. No one ever tells me anything.”

Rey steps forward, angling herself between the droid and her ward. “But surely you must have seen them together.”

At the Jedi’s interjection, Threepio glances once more around the room prior to leaning in. “I served Mistress Padmé for three years after Master Anakin returned to Tatooine. He gave me to her. They were together many times after that.”

Rey nods thoughtfully. “And did anything change between them?”

“Why, the more time they spent together, the more disordered Mistress Padmé’s thoughts became.”

Ben folds his arms. “So it seems.”

“Entropy,” Rey murmurs, prompting Threepio to cock his head. Then the crash of glass diverts his attention.

“Oh, do be careful!” he shouts at a servant standing over a shattered vase. “No more of this Anakin Skywalker gibberish, not while we have a gala to plan and only a day until our guests arrive…” C-3PO shoves his datapad into Rey’s open hands before bustling after a servant carrying a teetering pile of plates. “Excuse me, sir. I said excuse me!”

By the time Ben turns for the door, Rey has consulted Threepio’s datapad and exchanged it for a folded tablecloth from a nearby stack. She unfolds it and hands him two corners. Ben would say no, but the softness of her fingers brushing his tethers him here.

Four tables deep, Ben admits they make a good team. Judging by the graceful ease with which she unfolds and drapes each cloth, and her gentle grin whenever their eyes meet, Rey seems to agree. As always with Rey, however, it doesn’t last.

“You’re putting the napkin there?” Ben observes incredulously as she hesitates above a plate, carefully folded napkin in hand. “Ah, you are.”

Only a sliver of her grin hangs between them now, belying her wry tone. “I’m thinking about it.”

His laughter echoes above the surrounding bustle. “You can’t be serious.”

Rey scowls, fumbling with the napkin’s embroidered hem. “Spoken like a man who’s never fought to survive.”

What does the scrawny Jedi know of survival, of dissolving in his parents’ crossfire so as not to get struck? What does she know of scrabbling to make a name from under shadows thick enough to smother heroes?

“You know nothing of survival,” he says. “Holed up in a Jedi temple.”

Momentarily she forgets her charge to protect him; two strides and she’s circled the table to quiver a breath from his chest.

“Careful, Senator Solo,” she hisses like an escape pod sealing. “I’m beginning to understand why someone wants you gone.”

Her words catch him off guard; he barks, sharp and startling, in reply. Under his steady examination, Rey’s eyes widen. He wonders if she can sense a fraction of the fever bubbling under his skin. He wonders if she’s burning up, too.

The clatter of golden limbs brings Ben back from the brink. “Oh my!” Threepio exclaims, waving his arms in distress. “I don’t believe Mistress Leia would be pleased to hear the two of you bickering like banthas in heat.”

“Like what?” Rey gasps. Ben jerks away from her, backing into a precarious pile of goblets that crash to the floor. He drops to his knees to recover the scattered goblets, anything to avoid Rey’s gaze.

“And the Jedi call themselves peacekeepers,” Threepio mutters, still shaking his head.

Rey mumbles so faintly Ben almost misses it over the clatter of metal. “Not anymore.”

If protocol droids could frown, C-3PO would be glowering. “I suggest you leave the great hall before you cause further damage. Perhaps you should seek out the caretaker, Miss Nandi. I believe she worked here before Master Anakin escorted Mistress Padmé here under the protection of the Jedi Council. Not unlike yourself, Ben.”

His hands start trembling so much he nearly knocks the stack over once more as he places the final goblet atop the table.

“I will, of course, report your behavior to Mistress Leia,” Threepio continues. “It’s only fair she knows how her son and his protector are faring.”

Rey slams shut the doors on their way out of the great hall, beaming wickedly when Ben shoots her a knowing glance. “Programmer incompetence,” she says as they cross the smooth marble halls in search of an outdoor exit. “Give me a droid repair kit and fifteen minutes, and I could set that straight.”

* * *

At the edge of the Naberrie property perches a squat crumbling cottage, its domed roof one gale from leaking. Although in his youth Ben explored every inch of the estate, his father’s warning rings clear as the cottage gradually peeks into view: leave Old Nandi alone. He’s typically given her a wide berth, until today with the secret journal burning holes through his pockets.

“Entropy,” he muses, fixating on Rey’s comment from the great hall rather than the secluded nature of the field through which they currently tromp. “So that’s what you argue about with the great Luke Skywalker.”

“We do not argue!” Yet her protest, loud enough to set a flock of pelikkis aflight from the surrounding brush, suggests Ben brushed a nerve. “Not like you two, anyway.”

The concept of Rey at the temple overhearing one of his infamous squabbles with his uncle nearly inspires Ben to break course from the cottage and leap into the lake. “He told you.” The assertion dares her to suggest otherwise.

She merely hums, a smug sound that conjures in Ben a heady mixture of irritation and desire. “He dislikes your brand of politics, you know.”

As if Luke ever attempted to conceal his distaste.

“Luke is foolish,” he mutters while the paved path gives way to dirt squelching underfoot. “He seeks to rebuild a galaxy on the bones of Old Republic myths. The galaxy needs order, not children’s tales.”

“Wrong again.” Rey nearly chuckles. Her suppressed snicker halves Ben’s age, height, and hair till he feels reduced to a child standing at his uncle’s feet. “The galaxy doesn’t need order, it needs balance. It needs the Force.”

“Structure brings balance. There’s no need for the Force.”

“I suppose you see a fixed future under the guidance of your Republic.”

“For the good of the Republic.”

He doesn’t miss the curl of her lip that mirrors his own. An undercurrent of disdain settles thickly in the mud sucking at their boots. The caretaker’s cottage inches closer. “The future is beyond our control—the Senate, the Jedi. Even Master Yoda couldn’t see it long enough to affect it.”

Now he chuckles. “Your Force has limits.”

Reddening cheeks and balled fists reveal her mounting frustration. Her mind splays bare before him in the spaces between her retorts. The way he can peel back her skin and run his fingers along her nerves is almost unfair. Almost. He questions if she senses people like this with her precious Force, if she holomaps their bodies before assaulting their minds.

Despite her visible agitation, she strikes true. “So it’s true what Senator Organa says. You’re just like him.”

“Who?” His vitriol surprises them both. He already knows who she's talking about, but if she’s stupid enough to bring his father into this, he’ll make her squirm.

Sure enough, she wriggles under the question, but answers more directly than expected. “Han Solo.”

“Han was a poor excuse for a father, and a poorer excuse for an insult.”

“Perhaps,” she concedes. “But he also mocked what he couldn’t understand.”

“What doesn’t exist.”

He hates her pity more than her blind faith. It leaves a sickly-sweet malla root taste in his mouth when she lets his jibe slide and reaches for his arm. Under bracers and a thick quilted tunic, his arm sears under her touch. It takes two attempts to coerce his muscles into shaking her loose.

“The future is always in motion,” she says, fingers furling like starflowers at dusk. “But there are those who fight against it. Master Luke spoke of an ancient Sith sect that believed determinism governed the galaxy. The Heresiarchs saw rules where we see choice.”

“What do you believe?”

“The Jedi believe that—”

“Not the Jedi. You. Rey.”

“I…” Curious, how her mouth twists into a thin line, how her endless supply of words dwindles. “Even if the Force has grand designs for universes beyond our own, it can’t control us. It only binds us.”

“A web.” Ben should be bored, but urging her on intrigues him further.

She nods, the familiar spark emerging to set her words alight. “Every action tugs at its threads, weaving new connections or snapping them irreparably. The Force may weave paths, but our choices can alter the… web. The Chosen One was prophesied to end the Sith, not establish the Empire. His actions destroyed millions before he brought balance to the galaxy.”

“You call this balance?”

“Anakin Skywalker overthrew the Empire.”

“Whole lot of good that’s done us.”

She peers at him, a puzzle trapped in the body of a man. “You really don’t believe in your Republic?”

“No,” he answers curtly. He makes no attempts to disguise this from his fellow Senators. Why pretend otherwise, even if the truth dulls the enthusiasm in Rey’s eyes? Still he’s eager to reignite her fervor, so he repeats, “What do you believe?”

As Rey halts, Ben worries whether he pushed too hard. Then he rips his eyes from his companion to the cottage door mere paces away. Quicker than Rey can withdraw a hand from the sleeves of her robe to knock, the door creaks ajar.

When a wizened face pokes out from the cracked door, Han’s words run again through Ben’s mind. But it’s too late for warnings. “Nandi?” he asks.

The caretaker nods meditatively, swinging the door wide open and beckoning her visitors to follow her inside. “Young Ben Solo,” she croaks, a thousand millaflower husks scattering in the wind. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

Years of service in the Galactic Senate enable Ben to maintain a neutral mask, despite his curiosity, as she ushers them into battered form-chairs, permanently contoured to bodies not their own. From the nanowave stovetop crammed into one corner of the room, a kettle whistles jauntily. Nandi bustles through the maze of furniture and overflowing bookshelves to answer its call.

“You expected me,” Ben says over the clink of porcelain and spoons. “Why?”

“It’s only natural you’d come asking about your grandparents.” Tea splashes into cups, which Nandi thrusts into their open hands. “After all, your mother did several years ago, while you grew inside of her. So many of us in the Lake Country remember our former queen. But I’m the only one left who knows her progeny still grace Varykino to this day.”

Unlike Ben, Rey does little to conceal her glee at Old Nandi’s statement. “So you know about Ben’s grandfather then.”

Beneath Nandi’s wrinkles, a frown takes shape as she murmurs, “Shiraya have mercy.”

The fear is old, the pity older, and Ben drains his cup in an effort to avoid a repeat performance of the reactions haunting his career, this time from a woman who knew the man Vader once was and still shudders at his memory.

“The Minnaus have been at Varykino for half a century. It is our duty to know. My eldest sister served as Padmé’s handmaiden. She died to protect our former queen.”

Cradling her forgotten teacup, Rey opens her mouth to speak, consolation pooling in her breath. Yet Nandi cuts her off with a brisk shake of the head, grey hairs scattering from beneath her cap.

“Working beside the Naberries has become the Minnau legacy. Our families’ fates are bound together, just like yours.”

Ben groans in protest. Rey’s teacup clatters into its saucer. “No, we’re not—”

Nandi cuts her off anew with a knowing, gap-toothed smile. “The Force works in mysterious ways. Of course you understand this, Master Jedi.” She inclines her head toward Ben, who can no longer hide behind an empty teacup. “What is it you wish to know, Ben Solo?”

“My grandmother. Did she marry Skywalker?”

Another creased frown from Nandi, this one more pensive than frightened. “They sent Teckla away.”

“Excuse me?” Rey asks impatiently.

“My eldest sister. This was before Padmé had asked her to serve as a handmaiden. Teckla worked in the villa’s kitchens, preparing and serving meals when the Naberrie family visited. Mostly she helped to tend the grounds while the family lived in Theed for the better part of the year. Teckla served Padmé and her Jedi escort when they sought sanctuary on Varykino over fifty years ago. When they departed abruptly a few days after their arrival, Teckla thought little of it.”

Ben recalls the two day gap in his grandmother’s journal entries after she resolved to fly to Geonosis, a gap irregular enough to warrant examination.

“Then the Jedi’s ship returned,” Nandi continues. “Although Teckla never saw them disembark. Next thing she knew, the caretaker Paddy was shooing away the whole staff. Paid them double and sent them home for a week, the sort of holiday fit for a new queen’s coronation.”

Slowly the missing entries take shape under Nandi’s invisible pen; still, Ben wants more. “Your sister didn’t know why.”

“If she had her suspicions, she kept them to herself. I was too young, you see, happy to have her at home again for a spell. Once the week was up, Teckla came back to the villa and found it empty. But over the next few years, a yellow starspeeder would land, no rhyme or reason to its arrival, and she’d be called upon to serve food to Padmé and her Jedi guest.”

Rey leans forward eagerly, toying with her robe’s hem. “Just the two of them?”

“Indeed, Master Jedi.”

She freezes under the title. “Rey will do.” Old Nandi smiles approvingly. “Do you have any evidence that Padmé ever married Anakin?”

Nandi’s smile disintegrates. Slowly she strains to her feet, joints creaking as she collects their cups and shuffles to the makeshift kitchen. “No more evidence than Teckla’s tales of the two adjacent rooms and one unused bed.”

“There must be more,” Ben pleads, agitation freckling his tone. “Anything.”

Old Nandi pivots from the tea service, scrutinizes him from head to foot, and makes the sign of Shiraya over her heart. “Caretakers keep records of Varykino—the grounds, the visitors, the food stores and incoming shipments.” Her chin juts in the direction of the bookshelves buckling under the weight of dusty tomes. “I remember one discrepancy in the ledgers from that week.”

Rey leaps to her feet, and Ben follows suit, back aching from the permanently indented form-chairs, imprinted by bodies half his size. He surreptitiously massages the muscles near the base of his back as he joins the women at the shelves. “The book,” he says. “Where is it?”

If he thinks Nandi’s smile is eerie, he finds her cackle positively bone-chilling as she gestures indiscriminately to the shelves. “In here, bound in black leather. Or is it blue?”

They divide up the colors, Ben stacking the black ledgers on a rickety table and Rey flipping through each blue-bound volume in search of the correct date. Dozens of sneezes, false victories, and muttered curses later, Ben finds the ledger in question, dated twenty-two years before the Battle of Yavin. Nandi makes quick work of the ledger, flipping to a page of financial accountings and pointing to a single transaction only one row long: “Pontifex, 500 credits.”

Ben may not be a religious man, but he notes the astronomical price. “Someone wanted to buy his silence.”

Nandi nods in assent, thumping the ledger with her gnarled finger to underscore her point. “Pontifexes charged much less in those days. 25 credits for a blessing, 50 credits for a wedding.”

“So they married in secret,” Rey breathes, generating another nod of approval from their host.

“She’s a smart one, Ben Solo. You’d do well to keep her.”

They leave the hut quickly after that, eager to mull over the new information and unwilling to subject themselves to further insinuation. With Nandi’s cottage at their backs and sun wisping through the late morning fog, they traipse toward Varykino, quietly at first until Rey turns to Ben.

“So the Chosen One chose to break his vows and marry a queen. Even prophecies can’t account for attraction.”

Only seconds after she speaks does Ben remember to school his surprise into his usual indifference. It’s too late, though, judging by Rey’s ghost of a grin.

“That’s what it must’ve come down to,” she continues, pausing in the middle of the path to face Ben. “The only force strong enough to pull Anakin towards the Dark Side. Not ego, not pride. Fear.”

“Even you understand that attraction is not fear.”

“Fear for the one he loved!” she exclaims as though he were a careless youngling manhandling a lightsaber. “He allowed himself to indulge his desires for Senator Amidala. He loved her, and he feared losing her—it’s all in her journal.” Then softly, “The whole galaxy suffered because of his fear. Desires lead people astray.”

“Attraction cannot be controlled,” he says.

“Precisely,” she says. (He longs to know how she has reached this conclusion, if she knows how instrumental she has been in teaching him the same lesson.) “Which is why structure cannot coexist with such chaos.”

“And the Force can?”  
“It does,” she says. “For what connects beings but attraction?”

“The conflict tore Anakin apart,” Ben warns, but his palm is already pressed against her cheek, already reddening beneath his fingers, already trembling from the heat. Momentarily, she leans into his touch. Momentarily, he feels a surge of happiness that reflects her own. Across the backdrop of closed eyelids, he imagines their webs interweaving, one choice at a time, until a single heartbeat sends the threads thrumming.

Then she jerks away, almost out of reach. “We’d eat each other alive like they did,” she whispers thickly, shaking her head and blinking too fast. “There’d be nothing left.”


	6. The Hope of It All

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Padmé shares a Nabooian wedding tradition with her new husband.

_22 BBY_

* * *

They send the Naberries’ faithful servants away for the week. They power down the groundskeeping droids. They pay the Pontifex handsomely for his silence. Then it’s just Padmé and Anakin overlooking the lake, the pearls stitched into her veil luminous at dusk, his Jedi robes an ominous reminder of the outside world.

She yearns for him to shed the robes, the commitments, but then who would he be? What would he have remaining to cling to but a girl-turned-Senator, half-fantasy, half-dream? So she refrains from tearing away his leathers, instead standing hand in hand with him as the sun sears the horizon. They are married, and they are alone.

“Annie,” she whispers. “My Annie,” and then he’s gone, sweeping her into the dark.

It’s a shame how their best moments occur at night, as if their responsibilities and secrets thicken under the sun. In the dark, there is no Jedi Council, no Senate, no vows and duties forcing them apart. In the dark, there is nothing but Annie—his voice, his hands, his soul.

In the morning, Padmé wakes with Annie curled around her, his mechno-hand tangled in her hair, his other hand guarding her hip. There are no robes, no ranks, nothing separating them. He groans when she twists under his grasp, reluctantly joining her on the terrace for breakfast. He sits just long enough to snag a shuura from the spread and rises before biting into it. All Padmé can see is his back as he watches the tide at the terrace’s edge.

Wind whips across the lake, leaving Padmé clutching at her shawl, desperate for warmth. So she asks him something—anything that will shift his scorching gaze from the horizon to her. “What wedding rituals exist on Tatooine?”

A hint of impatience glimmers as he pivots from the balcony to face her. His smile is wide, pleasant even, but his teeth glint too brightly in the wake of the ascending sun. “Sand,” he finally replies. “Each partner scoops a handful of sand into a jar. It mixes like their lives will from that day forward.” His grin stonifies. Is he thinking of his mother, of Cliegg who failed to protect her? Then time lurches onward, and the way Annie’s eyes rake over her thin robe reddens Padmé’s cheeks. “How do they do it on Naboo?”

Not a question, but a dare.

“After the vows, before the ceremony ends, we break bread.”

“Bread.” Skepticism.

“Star systems across the galaxy share this tradition! You haven’t heard of it?”

“Never.”

“So much for your Jedi wisdom,” she taunts. He falters for a moment and she worries she pushed too far. But then his smirk urges her to continue. “Bread symbolizes life. Breaking bread together represents the start of a new life.”

“Together.” His tongue caresses the words, sending phantom tingles down Padmé’s spine.

Her reply is more of a gasp than a word. “Yes.”

“Then we’ll share bread.” In one sinuous movement, he pushes off the balcony railing, darting to the table and slicing into the bread with a silver knife more ornamental than practical. Silver that the Naberries have owned for hundreds of years. He offers Padmé a piece balanced on the tip of her foremothers’ knife. She almost reaches for it.

“Not yet,” she laughs. “Once one partner cuts the bread, the other spreads the jam.” Her fingers find the spoon set out next to the jar of Endor jam tucked between the loaf and fruit.

“Oh,” he says, mock-solemnity failing to shield her from his amusement.

“Annie!” But there’s no bite to her reprimand. “When I was little, I used to imagine myself standing across an altar, preparing bread and jam with my groom. But I could never picture his face.”

Instead of amusing him, the story creases his brow into a frown. A pout sketches its way across his mouth, disappearing when Padmé brings a slice of bread, red preserves dripping from its crust, to his lips.

“He never could have compared to you anyway,” she says lightly, half-confession and half-apology. At this, the tendons leaping from the backs of his hands ease; he feeds her the second slice, bite by bite, letting his fingers catch in her teeth. Her stomach flips at the contact, leaving her cold.

The sun beats down through the canopy of trees, promising a hot day, catching in the whites of Annie’s teeth, burning away the darkness of night. Yet the dread coils tight in Padmé's gut. So she laughs at the seeds smeared at the corner of Annie’s lips, kisses the sticky into sweet, and breaks off another piece of toast to slide past his laughter and onto his tongue. He licks her fingers clean, and then they’re sweeping it all away—the toast, the porcelain, the jar that shatters against the marble terrace tiles—until there’s room on the table for both of their bodies pressed tight: one crystallized moment stirring together their lives irreversibly, red jam staining the whole of it.


	7. Tallest Tiptoes, Highest Heels

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As she prepares to attend a celebration in Theed, Leia discovers her mother's journal and another secret she hesitates to share with Han.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: This chapter talks about an unplanned pregnancy. Pregnancy will also come up throughout the rest of Padmé and Leia's storylines (never in graphic detail, and never in the context of birth). I outlined this story in the spring when my spouse and I were trying to get pregnant. Initially my anxious excitement bled through the writing. But I didn't get pregnant for a variety of reasons. It made this plot line (which is central to the story) bittersweet for me to finish over the past few months. I understand if this subject is an exit point for folks dealing with similar experiences, or general aversions to the topic. If that's the case, thank you so much for reading this far. :)

_5 ABY_

* * *

He kisses her once more before slapping her behind and leaping out of range. “Sorry, sweetheart,” Han chuckles. “You don’t have time for that.” When Leia switches tack, reaching for him in a far more conciliatory manner, drinking him in through her eyelashes and affecting that coy scowl she knows makes him hard, he turns on his heel and heads down the hall. “Two standard hours,” he calls over his shoulder, unscrewing the flask he keeps in his breast pocket. “Either you’re dressed and we’ll leave on time, or I’ll never let it go.”

As Leia’s grumbling echoes down the now-empty hall, she shuts the door to her birth mother’s chambers. These rooms, austere despite their gauzy blue draperies, housed the late Padmé Amidala every time she visited the Naberrie estate in Varykino. The first time that Leia set foot on the property, the caretaker—a hunched humanoid named Nandi, who had served the Naberries since the Clone Wars—insisted on escorting her to her mother’s chambers. “She would have burst with pride, seeing you here,” Nandi insisted, and Leia hadn’t the heart to request alternative accommodations. Months later, it has become routine for her to stay with Han in this room, although the place gives him the creeps.

No stranger to her mother’s quarters, Leia strides carefully to the well-preserved closet. Inside hang rows of the late queen’s gowns. They smell of star jasmine and cedar. To Leia, it’s the closest tie binding her to biological parents she didn’t know. There she hangs her own dress for the evening, a burgundy crepe too stiff for her liking. But Theed expects formality, and the New Republic doubly so.

From the closet, Leia moves to the ‘fresher, in which she only has a few hours to prepare prior to their departure for Theed. The New Republic cannot wait, no matter how she desires to hold space with her mother’s gowns, or lounge on the terrace with Han, or roll with him in the fields surrounding the estate. Their presence will be expected tonight, as New Alderaan’s senator and the Rebellion hero. They will mingle with politicians, donors, and legacy families from Naboo’s capital, toasting the peace treaties and dancing to celebrate the first anniversary of the Empire’s decline. A decline paid for in Skywalker blood.

Luke never attends these events, despite Chancellor Mothma sending a dozen holograms begging him to put in an appearance. On the other hand, Han hates to dance, but he hates the Empire more. So he allows Leia to straighten his bowtie and stands by her side as she dutifully supports the New Republic through incisive praise and idle chatter, pounding down drinks from every passing tray. At a respectable hour, they say their farewells and return home, Han slightly buzzed and Leia warding off a thrumming headache after one glass of membrosia. Afterward, they commemorate another successful evening of schmoozing and politicking by kissing each other senseless until their formalwear litters a path from front door to bed.

It’s Leia’s favorite part of evenings like these.

Her least favorite part is the preparation, the anticipation of another night demanding Senator Leia Organa, a facade that she finds more tiring to assume the more time she spends around Han. Just this spring, an unfamiliar ache has started to blossom in her joints. After a tedious interplanetary flight and speeder cruise to Varykino, she wishes for nothing more than a fluffy mattress with Han lounging by her side. But first, the New Republic Anniversary.

In the full length ‘fresher mirror, she appraises her face: a thin mouth, an oval shape, a faint red flush painting the peaks of her cheekbones. Leia has seen Padmé Amidala’s face hundreds of times in holo-images. A few of the queen’s speeches exist on hologram, too. She has studied the woman’s flowing brown hair, her warm brown eyes, her full red lips. Leia wonders how much of her father stares back from the mirror tonight.

Her hands tremble as she unfastens the utilitarian braid knotted around her head. In her quest to unravel it, she drops one pin and then another. They clatter on the tiles underfoot. Something about her mother’s room rattles her this evening, though she’d never admit it to Han. Not that he’s here to see—probably off wandering the grounds, puttering with the boats lashed to the dock, or escaping Threepio’s constant prattle. The image prompts a smile. Nearly a year after they linked hands at the battle of Endor, the thought of Han still warms her soul from the inside out.

Caring for her hair does not.

“You know,” Leia mutters as her hands catch in a snarl, “there has to be a brush in here somewhere.”

No brush can be found in the ‘fresher, so she first expands her search to the closet, next the bedroom. She opens each nightstand drawer, examines each inlaid box perched delicately on the bureau, before moving to the desk. The desk’s honeyed wood creaks in protest as she slides open its topmost drawer. It reveals not a brush, but a leather folio bound in buttery brown leather, smooth under her trembling fingers. She hesitates to untie the strip of leather binding the covers closed; maybe some ghosts are better left to rest undisturbed. Yet she can’t shake her hunger for this woman consumed by sadness in a shard of her memory.

With the commemoration ceremony still a few hours off, Leia sets aside her hairbrush quest and opens the journal, nestling into the bed that once belonged to her mother, too. Out spills a few loose parchment leaves, a folded note, and a scrap of cream embroidered lace so fine that Leia frets it may crumble at first touch. She hates the way her eyes sting as the paper crinkles under her fingers.

For a moment, she soaks in the shape of her mother’s letters, the slant of her elegant script. She notes the characters pressed through pages, evidence of a pen tip whose pressure nearly tore the parchment. She observes the fastidious documentation of both date and location listed above each entry. So this is—was—Padmé Amidala. For a moment, this is enough—the hollow of letters and smell of ink. Then the yearning spurs Leia to read.

* * *

Skimming past the annotated legislation (a copy of a resolution protecting Gungans from Federation retaliation) and a dressmaker’s receipt (for a blue velvet traveling gown that costs more than Han’s speeder bike), Leia delves into the dated entries: first, Naboo with reflections on Padmé’s transition from queen to Senator; then Coruscant with details of her work with Senator Binks.

When Leia reaches the Naboo entries, she slows her reading pace in order to savor every word. Padmé writes of fire and heat that ignites between her and a man she refers to simply as “him.” This passion blurs the distinction between duty and honor and consumes them in a sunset ceremony by the water. She writes of pouring all the warmth her heart can hold into her husband, only to shiver in his embrace. _Something goes missing from me to him_ , one feverish entry reveals in an unusually cramped script. _I have traded transparency for his company and even with him, I cannot see clearly anymore._

 _It’s cold_ , another entry explains, _too cold for a Lake Country summer. We flew here for the evening. When he undressed in the ‘fresher I caught a glimpse of a cut that extends past his belt, but he wouldn’t say a word when I asked him about it. Something feels strange, wrong_ — _I don’t know who to tell._

The account’s intimacy positions Leia as an intruder. Her mother’s passion for this man-turned-monster is almost too personal to read. Yet she can’t tear herself away from the fragments of the parents she should’ve known.

 _I feel them,_ Padmé writes one evening in the shortest entry to date. _I know they’re here._ Tucked between these pages: a printed med droid report documenting two heartbeats where Padmé expected one. A shudder crawling down her spine and through her stomach, Leia burrows deeper into the pillows and flips the page, desperation fanning her study.

* * *

Night has cloaked the Naberrie estate by the time Leia tears her eyes from her mother’s journal. Entries that started out burning with optimism have faded into world-weary embers under Leia’s fingers. She intended to set aside the journal ages ago, the anniversary celebration bearing down upon her, but just one more entry after a lifetime of imagining her biological mother is too hypnotic a call to resist.

It’s Han who pulls her from the pages of the past, banging open the door to the room and sauntering to her bedside, a twinkle in his eyes and a complaint on his lips about his karking bowtie that refuses to stay tied. Leia slams the book shut, wipes the telltale wrinkle from her brow, and leans up to tug at his tie.

With Han, every touch can spring a trap. He captures Leia’s hands when they near his lapels, rubs them in one swift motion, and wrinkles his nose when his calluses catch on her satin-smooth knuckles. “Okay, Princess,” he says. “Let’s get this straight. You’re telling me to dress up, but you’re laying in bed half-naked and it’s time to go?” The once-over he gives her is targeted to make her blush, clutch her Onderon silk robe, and kiss his mouth shut. Leia simply shoots him an obscene gesture that makes Han change tack.

“That ain’t what I had in mind, but lucky for you, I’m easy to persuade.” A wink, and his hands weave under hers, undoing the sash faster than she can object. After a few well-placed slaps, Han abandons course.

“Later,” she says, scurrying from the bed to the closet.

“I think you can’t handle a guy like me in a coat like this.” As Leia shrugs off the lavender robe, she has to admit that her husband strikes a dashing figure in his gaberwool tuxedo, made especially for the Rebellion hero and gifted free of charge by the awestruck tailor. She says as much, and the stiff burgundy crepe barely makes it up to her waist before Han tugs her from the dress and deposits her back onto the bed.

“Why, you flea-bitten, laser brained—!” He cuts her off with a kiss that plasters her to the headboard and sets aflight all thoughts of the anniversary celebration. A buoyancy she can’t capture outside of his presence thrums through her blood. This kind of intimacy—near telepathy—intoxicates her faster than the obligatory glass of membrosia at these kinds of events.

The obligatory glass of membrosia which she’ll have to decline tonight.

Her belly leaps. Tomorrow she’ll tell Han, or the day after, but not tonight. Not when everything between them lays perfectly smooth.

A metallic rap on the door wrenches his lips from hers. “Not now, Threepio!” Han hollers.

“If I may—”

“You may not,” he growls.

“Senator Organa, you’ve kept the queen waiting half an hour. We really must be on our way!”

The protocol droid’s desperation seeps through the heavy wooden door. So Leia breaks her husband’s hold on her waist, does up the buttons on her crepe herself, and ties a crisp bow around Han’s neck.

“Gee, thanks, sweetheart,” he sighs, tugging at his collar, but he kisses her neck once more as they follow Threepio to the idling speeder under the stars.


	8. A Very Thin Line

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ben spends the night falling for and falling out with Rey.

_34 ABY_

* * *

Tonight Padmé’s journal holds little distraction for Ben between its buttery covers. He can’t see beyond Rey’s jam-stained lips, her fingertips grazing his as he passed her the journal. Energy thrums through his every cell, raising hairs on end and sparking lightning across his skin. He can’t think beyond her, and he resents the rush as much as he craves it.

Sleep evades him as he lays awake atop his bed, tracking every muffled movement from next door. Cursing his mother for suggesting the Jedi sleep in the adjoining room, he strides across his own room and flings open the windows. Cursing again when the lake’s humidity washes in on the still night, he tugs off his thick tunic in preparation for another bid at rest.

The practical solution strikes him as he reaches for the buttons on his trousers. Ben does not often indulge in such urges. It’s easier to push them down rather than sate them so distastefully. But tonight he is a desperate man, so he pushes his pants down.

The first moan that escapes him burns low in his throat, but the one that chases it rises to the rafters of his grandmother’s old bedroom. He can’t fight back the growl, desperate for release.

Then he hears it—a thud from next door, followed by a clattering and the patter of footsteps. He jerks his hand free, yanking up his pants and diving under the quilt just as Rey bursts through their shared doors, hair down and lightsaber drawn. Her eyes dance in the blue glow. The plasma hum does nothing to drown out her panting as she advances on him.

Blinking once, twice, she surveys the entire room before meeting his eyes. “Where are they?”

“Who?” He hopes the quilt tucked loosely around his waist is enough to hide evidence of his previous activities.

She scours the room again, blade still humming as she peeks into the closet and the ‘fresher. “You’re alone.”

Ben imagines the plush mattress engulfing him, shielding him from her probing gaze that skewers him to the headboard. “As I should be at this hour.”

“I thought I heard…”

It clicks: her worry, her weapon, her rumpled robe. “Assassins?” he asks, amusement suffusing his shame.

“Assassins,” she confirms. “But…”

“There are none.”

Her gulp echoes in the ensuing hush. “Oh.”

He softens as she calcifies, rooted to the navy carpet. Eventually she powers down her saber, but wears no belt on which to hang it.

“Um,” she says, valiantly refusing to look below his neck. Ben didn’t know that ears could flush so red. “Do you have, um…” She glances once along the lines of his torso, then scrambles out of her coarse brown robe and hurls it across the room. It smacks against his bare chest. “Put that on.”

“I doubt it fits.” While Rey’s robe hangs oversized on her frame, it does little to disguise his bare chest.

“Find a shirt then!” Rey splutters and Ben’s gratitude intensifies for her heavy footfalls, unintentional warnings that prevented a discovery of the worst kind. There’s no way she would have willingly entered the same room as him again had she found his hands down his pants. He lays her robe delicately over a nearby chair and retreats to the closet.

When he emerges fully clothed in a simple black sleepshirt, Rey moans. “I’m sorry for disturbing you.”

“For protecting me,” he says, surprised at how much he likes the notion. “Thank you.”

They stand like that, half a room apart, until Ben motions to Padme’s folio resting on his bedside table. “I was reading.” Or had been, before he got distracted.

“I can’t get her words out of my head,” Rey admits, approaching his bedside.

“Stay,” he says, part request and part prayer. “Read with me.” When she hesitates, he cracks a smile. “You weren’t sleeping anyway.”

Flashing across her face are a thousand excuses. Ben resigns himself to an evening of almosts until she perches on the corner of his bed. “Okay.”

“Okay,” he echoes, because how is he supposed to respond when the object of his fantasies doesn’t disappear once she assures his safety? For a while, they read in companionable silence. As he notes the diminishing distance between their knees, the way their hands brush as they reach for a page simultaneously, the quiet laugh certain entries draw from her, his insides wind up tight again.

Before he explodes, Rey breaks the tension with a snort. “Padmé’s too generous with him. Anakin never left her by herself after that nightmare. From then on, she had a droid, a Jedi guard, or her husband trailing her every move. And yet she still loved him.”

“I wonder what that’s like,” he says dryly, but his humor is lost on her.

“That’s enough to smother anyone!” she huffs. “Don’t you think she wanted space?”

“Space?” he echoes, humor twisting bitterly. “Han ran away for three standard weeks when my mother told him she was pregnant. Took a Wookiee and a spice run gone wrong to haul him back. She never forgave him after that. How’s that for space?”

Expecting her to fire back, he braces himself against the mattress. Yet Rey flips another page and shifts closer. If he turned from the journal to face her, his nose would brush her hair. He wonders what it smells like. He wonders if she’d mind.

Rey lingers on another entry dated two months ahead of Padmé’s death. The queen’s tone is harder here, her questions sharp and her doubt virulent as she describes Anakin’s growing possessiveness. “Does he still love her at this point?” Rey asks. “Or does he love the idea of her?”

Both, he understands, even as he worries about falling into the same trap. But then she bites her lip, staring at him sidelong, and he realizes his imagination’s wildest dreams pale in comparison to the person at his side. “He couldn’t tell the difference.”

A yawn eclipses her reply.

“It’s late,” he says gently.

She bristles, but can’t swallow a second yawn. “It’s nothing.”

Fighting her is trying to ground an X-wing in battle. So he only says, “Rey,” all of this foreign hope and admiration wrapped up in her name.

She stiffens, then softens in the unusual absence of combat. Maybe she’s tired of fighting, too. “Go on without me,” she mumbles, or maybe it’s his imagination, but then she’s rolling from stomach to side, curling into a pillow and letting her legs line up with his. Ben doesn’t move for a very long time. Concentrating on the journal demands additional effort as his eyes begin to burn in the dim lamplight, but he cannot let this moment end.

As he nears the end of the journal for the second time, an entry tugs at his consciousness. On Coruscant mere weeks before her death, Padmé’s thoughts shift to Anakin. _His nightmares grow worse. I wake him up, but he can’t fall back asleep. I stay awake with him so he knows I’m here. Whole. Since he’s had so little control in his life, I give him this security for a few hours before he has to leave for the temple. I tell him we’ll be fine, but something still feels wrong._

A dozen more pages and her story ends abruptly, like it did on Ben’s first read. Desperation drives him to wriggle away from Rey and pace the length of the bedroom until his frustration simmers. Rather than producing answers, Padmé’s musings have generated more questions.

As a young boy, Ben wished to meet his grandfather, to question the man behind Vader’s mask, to ask him how he corralled a galaxy into compliance. Today he wishes for a fraction of the man’s leadership, to borrow his power and force the New Republic Senate from corruption into action. Reading the journal, he hoped, might reveal more of the grandfather he knows of only from legends. Yet the pieces of the man that Padmé describes don’t fit together neatly. Ben can’t cobble together a proper picture without sacrificing some pieces.

Perhaps Rey overlooked something as she pulled the diary from the desk—a second volume, or a postscript that fell out over the years. Yet flinging open the first drawer reveals nothing of note: a broken datapad older than himself; one chalcedony earring, its mate long gone; a crumpled handkerchief embroidered with silvery jasmine flowers. The second drawer lays bare, but the third contains a stack of blank parchment that sets Ben’s pulse racing.

Fishing under the blank parchment, he draws out a folded page, yellowed and brittle. He has to step into the candlelight in order to read its single sentence printed below the embossed Naberrie family crest: _I can’t do this anymore._

The penmanship is spindly, more scrawl than script—from haste or carelessness, Ben can’t tell. It looks familiar. When he squints, it might pass for Padmé’s handwriting. Yet he’s not willing to wake Rey over the discovery. Not with so many unanswered questions.

What he knows is that someone splintered under the weight of these words. But another secret—a stolen evening with Rey by his side—presses him back into bed. She shifts at the movement, mumbling nonsense as she dreams. Ben can’t look away. He wonders at the Skywalker pumping through his veins, cursing him to want what he can’t have. He swears he won’t sleep, not while she nestles into him on borrowed time.

Despite his best efforts, he nods off, one hand winding around her waist. No need for a blanket, notwithstanding the breeze blowing in from the water, thanks to her body heat. Her hair splays across his face when she shifts closer to his chest. He dreams of sunshine and dirt after rain, and a sad woman who can’t reach the man by her side.

* * *

He slips from dream to wakefulness like breaking the lake’s surface and gasping for air. Instead of immediately opening his eyes, he lies still, taking stock of their twisted limbs and her breath against his chest.

Already awake, Rey makes no attempt to feign sleep, but she averts her eyes when Ben finally opens his. Her ears redden again, igniting the embers in his stomach. So she was watching. Without pulling away from his embrace.

She murmurs something he can’t hear over the exultant din inside his head.

“Hm?” he says into her hair.

“I shouldn’t have stayed.”

“I’m happy you did.” Saying so sets loose the fire in his stomach upon the rest of his frame. They stay like that, noses a microvalve apart, until he bolts upright, recalling last night’s discovery. Cautiously Ben pries it from the journal’s pages, grateful for his foresight to tuck it away last night before drifting to sleep, and presents it to Rey. Propped up by pillows, they scrutinize each malformed character, excitement undercutting curiosity.

“Anakin,” Rey whispers. “It has to be him. Who else would leave a note preserved in Padmé’s room?”

Ben frowns, a niggling familiarity brushing the back of his consciousness. “Could be anyone. How do you know?”

“Trust me. I just… know.”

“Okay,” he says, because the urge to give of himself to this scrap of a scavenger has his heart bruising his ribs. But her assumption doesn’t sit right with him. “Only pages before he swore to protect her.”

“He must’ve changed his mind.”

“Which contradicts everything we know about him from the journal.”

“They must’ve had a falling out,” she says dismissively, picking up the letter and turning it over. “Plenty of couples do. Order into disorder, remember?”

His parents are living testaments to Rey’s declaration, yet Ben chafes under it. “Padmé describes his obsession increasing. No signs indicate he’d change his mind. If anything, he seems more committed.”

Rey’s fingers trace the stitched lines spiraling across the quilt, never one to think completely still. “Senator Amidala doesn’t. The further into her pregnancy, the worse the secrecy weighs on her.”

“So if anyone couldn’t ‘do this…’”

“It would’ve been her.”

The air changes, colder now, and Ben suppresses a shiver. Hair on his limbs stands at attention. “It was more than an argument, I’m sure of it. Something drove Anakin to the Dark Side. A few nightmares couldn’t erode his dedication to the Jedi Order.”

The wry twinge of Rey’s lips is not lost on Ben. “But attraction erodes order,” she points out.

“Not just attraction. Desperation. ‘I can’t do this anymore.’ She must have tried to leave him.”

The quilt bunches under Rey’s attention. “Maybe it was too much. She certainly wrote like it. She could have planned to run away and birth the children in private. Raise them out of the public eye.”

“Which would’ve destroyed Anakin.”

“We know what he’s capable of,” she says darkly. “He wouldn’t have let her walk away unprotected. So he sought power to stop her.”

Sliding into place, pieces of a long-forgotten puzzle seem to wedge themselves in place, not without effort. Ben’s not sure all of the pieces fit. But they combine to create a clearer picture of his grandparents than the shadows ruling the fringes of his memory.

“This letter and journal are the keys to unlocking Vader’s rise to power!” he exclaims. “Years of speculation about what drove him to the Dark Side, and we hold the answers! This could change the galaxy.”

Anticipating Rey’s excitement, Ben fails to notice the frown seeping into her shoulders. But he can’t miss her sigh, brittle as glass.

“You admire him,” she whispers, excitement scratched away.

Who is she to accuse and judge all in one breath? “He was my grandfather,” Ben snaps.

Her revelation shifts to revulsion, so visceral in the slump of her spine that it sets Ben’s insides churning. “He was a monster."

“He did monstrous things,” he acquiesces. “But he did them for love. To protect her!”

“The murder of millions, the enslavement of billions, the extinction of planets—that is not protecting.”

Crimson and blue sparks obscure his vision. He longs to shake Rey, to make her understand. It materializes fully formed in the darkest part of his mind. While he can’t hold the words back, he knows how they’ll wound. “You’re no expert in protection. You’re just a lonely little girl clinging to a lightsaber and an outdated code.”

“You never waste an opportunity to spit on the Force, but I heard you at the temple years ago, Ben Solo, when I was a youngling. I heard you begging Luke to take you—”

“You know nothing, scavenger.”

When she flinches infinitesimally, Ben knows his words have hit their mark. But Rey never goes down easy. She eyes him, too quiet. Then she strikes. “I know that you begged and he said no. You were too old.”

He can’t steady his voice enough, familiar hate twisting around a new target. “A lucky guess.”

“Twelve years old and you hadn’t touched a lightsaber, let alone built your first hilt.” Rey frowns. Her pity tastes like bitter bark tea. “He loved you, but he couldn’t take you on. It was too late.”

“Save your pity, Jedi.” He hurls the barbed title at her gut. She bears its brunt without flinching, so he aims again. “Better I had a family than a lightsword.”

“You don’t deserve them, Senator,” she spits, leaping from the bed and scrambling to put distance between them. Her hands retreat, seeking shelter in her sleeves. He chases after them, half-formed apologies stumbling on his tongue, but they tremble beneath the woolen robe and the words die on his lips.

“We’re done here,” she declares. For the first time since landing on Naboo, Rey exudes the neutrality becoming of a Jedi Master. “Your mother expects you to join her for breakfast in the Room of Morning Mists. I won’t keep you waiting.” When she strides from the room, Ben’s stuck shivering in her wake. The letter falls from his fingers and drifts to the floor under the bed.

So it really does boil down to this. Even the fiercest stars wink out, too much energy burned away in futile pursuits. Were Rey still here, he’d crow at the proof. But he’s alone, longing to overturn last morning’s bowl of oats before the preserves’ seal ever splits.

Today he eats his bread plain. “We’re all out,” Nandi apologizes when his traitorous hands search for Endor jam. The bread sticks like wet sand going down.


	9. A Curve, A Sphere

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A conversation between Rey and Leia sheds more light on the Skywalker family mysteries.

_34 ABY_

* * *

Representatives of the New Republic should not sulk, yet Ben whiles away the afternoon by his chambers’ open windows, catching glimpses of Rey as she paces the beach below. The small satisfaction he gleans from each agitated step that brings her face into focus is swallowed by his mounting frustration. She hasn’t returned to the room, not to review gala security measures in preparation for the guests’ arrival nor pore over the journal like last night.

His pillow still smells like sun and rain, a hundred contradictions and a night spent in arms he can never claim.

When he splits his knuckles on the stone windowsill, Ben abandons his vigil and seeks refuge in his grandmother’s journal. Last night’s discovery pokes free from its pages, so he pulls out the letter and rereads it, the words already etched into his heart.

_I can’t do this anymore._

He can’t, either. This much has Rey made clear. No matter the invisible forces flinging them together, they cannot give into each other. Not with civic responsibilities and religious vows pressing at their backs. Not when they can’t converse without devolving into argument, no matter how perfectly their hips slot together when they sleep.

In a matter of hours, the villa will be overrun with chatter and feathers, simpering silks and manufactured civility. Ben loathes events like these; he’s a fool to imagine that tonight will be any different than the hundreds of charity balls sponsored by his legislative colleagues. But he can’t squash a malignant hope, only a half-formed collage of images: his hand meeting Rey’s, her teeth shining under the chandeliers, the room blurring as they spin across its golden glow.

He can’t do this. To her, to himself. So he flings the leather folio on the desk, where it lands with a dull thud. Then he reaches for the chair. It splinters against the chamber’s stone walls. The inkwell, the mirror, the contents of the desk’s top drawer. Each shatter should leave him craving Rey a little less. Instead he recalls lost heat and pieces that can’t put themselves back together no matter how easily they explode.

When the fight drains him cold, Ben slumps to the ground and makes no effort to move for minutes, or possibly hours. Surrounded by broken heirlooms, he startles when he hears approaching footsteps and two voices low in conversation: his mother and Rey.

The voices draw closer and the doorknob rattles. Ben has nowhere to hide. The thought of encountering Rey with his mother, of them discovering his destruction, propels him to dash from his bedroom onto the balcony, slamming the windowed doors so hard the panes rattle in their kriin-wood frames. Its gauzy curtains swish shut, leaving a thin crack through which Ben can peek.

Just in time—for the main door to his chamber creaks open and sure enough, his mother and bodyguard walk in. “Ben?” Leia calls, checking the closet and ‘fresher when it becomes apparent that her son is not in bed.

Rey doesn’t bother searching the room, first narrowing in on the pile of wood and glass shards at the desk’s feet, and on top of it, the journal. Surreptitiously she reaches for the book and slides into her robe.

When her son doesn’t materialize and Rey points out evidence of his earlier tantrum, Leia laughs. It draws a reluctant grin from Ben, but a inquisitive look from the Jedi.

“Typical Ben,” she explains.

“I see,” Rey replies, but her bemusement lingers.

“You’ve met Ben at his calmest,” Leia says, settling onto her son’s bed. The sky-blue quilt gives way under her voluminous, somber skirts. “But he used to struggle with his temper.”

As if his Senatorial reputation hasn’t already suggested that.

Leia continues, “When Ben was a child, he squawked louder than Artoo. With you the past few days, he’s quiet. Peaceful.”

Rey disguises her snort as a cough, but she doesn’t fool Ben. “Senator Solo, quiet?” Disbelief and amusement line every syllable.

“Oh, he’s never been _quiet._ But he’s stiller, surer somehow with you. Like he can finally breathe without screaming.”

Ben hates his feet for planting themselves to the balcony’s flextiles instead of marching in and disbanding this conversation in time to catch the flush leaping up Rey’s cheeks. “You are too kind, Senator,” Rey says. “But the gala starts soon. I must sweep the villa perimeter with my security detail before your guests arrive.”

“Our guests, Madam Jedi,” Leia corrects warmly. Rey shifts uncomfortably at her insistence. Serves her right.

“Our guests.” A woodenness reminiscent of Ben clips each of her words. No matter Leia’s insistence, Rey is not part of their world. She’s made that repeatedly clear to Ben. He pities his mother for trying to include her, and banishes all fantasies of a Rey who fits into their circle not as a glorified bodyguard, but as family.

However tantalizing the vision, it cannot be. He hates himself for straining to see its edges more clearly: the way their hands touch, the way his voice wavers as he extends the offer to join him, the way her fingers weave warmth into his. He suppresses a scream and the scene dissolves to black, stardust as dreams should be.

“Before you sweep that perimeter,” Leia says, “you must indulge an old woman. What do you plan to wear tonight?”

“These robes.” Silence, then Rey scrambles to elaborate. “Not these robes, I mean. A clean pair. My leather boots, too. Finest leather in this system…” She trails off at Leia’s long-suffering sigh.

“Forgive me, Rey, but the Jedi are not… You understand that some members of the Galactic Federation distrust the Jedi.”

For good reason, Ben wants to shout, but he stays still and lets his fingernails carve moons into his palms.

“The Jedi have been working to rebuild a stronger galaxy in harmony with the Force.”

“And you know I believe you’re doing a bang-up job. However, not all of my colleagues—our guests—would agree.”

“I know.”

“Which is why I would like your affiliation hidden for the night,” Leia explains. “Only to protect yourself.”

“I can take care of myself—”

“And Ben,” she adds gently.

All protests die on Rey’s lips. “Oh.”

“A Jedi tailing Senator Solo at an event among friends suggests we distrust them. His life may be in danger, but they don’t need to know that. And you would benefit from the element of surprise.”

Ben expects Rey to list a minimum of five counterpoints in response to his mother’s request; from their arguments this week, he knows her impulsive tongue outweighs her Jedi training. He knows her—and yet she surprises him.

“For Ben,” she declares. His name on her tongue sends that flare of warmth through his gut he’s begun to crave.

“For Ben,” Leia agrees. He can imagine the gleam in her eyes as he listens to the wardrobe creak open. Its contents rustle, a heap of satina and taffeta and shimmersilk. “These dresses belonged to my mother.”

“Senator Amidala!” Ben prays Rey keeps the journal secret.

“I never had much of her,” says Leia, sweet where Ben might sound bitter. “Just these dresses and a memory of her sadness.”

“They’re beautiful." Do Rey's fingertips skim the rich fabrics, or does she pull away before she can indulge?

“I’d like you to wear one tonight.”

Another strangled cough. Despite the limited amount of time Rey has spent serving the Organa-Solo family, Ben concludes she really shouldn’t be so shocked to get caught in his mother’s machinations. With such proximity, it’s inevitable.

“Senator—”  
“Please, call me Leia.”

“Leia, I can’t.”

“I insist.”

“I’m not sure they’ll fit.” Rey’s weak protest reveals her flagging defenses. Ben’s seen the gowns and Rey’s waist. A perfect match, not that she’d admit it.

The finality in Leia’s tone brooks no further argument. “They will.”

A fluttering of fabric leaves Ben’s throat dry. He draws his lips tight, banishing all thoughts of Rey’s Jedi sashes pooling to the floor. Despite his efforts, the rustling rises to the forefront of his consciousness. He’s almost grateful when Leia breaks his concentration.

“My mother’s wardrobe dwarfed Theed,” she laughs. “So many faces she had to wear for so many different occasions. How fitting to disguise you in one of her gowns.”

Ben has encountered speechless Rey often, spluttering indignantly or cocooning herself in thoughts too dense to warrant his intrusion. Today she is not enraged nor thoughtful. Today she sounds stunned.

“It’s… so smooth.”

“You look beautiful,” Leia says fondly. “Padmé would be proud.”

“You’re too kind.” Always deflecting, always ready to run.

“She wore this dress for my father, you know. He was a Jedi, too.” And a Sith. “Forbidden to form attachments, and yet he married my mother in these very halls.”

Blood coagulates in Ben’s veins. His heart stops pumping. His lungs burn for air, yet he can’t force his chest to compress. For Leia to know about such intricate details about her parents’ wedding…

“You spoke to Nandi,” Rey breathes, almost too faint for Ben to make out. "You read her journal!"

“Every entry twice over.” Her voice snags, rends. “It’s all I have left of her.”

Ben knows Rey would cut off her lightsaber hand—break every Jedi vow—for a book from her parents. His chest aches at her sigh, then again as the rustling fabric resumes and his imagination leaps into hyperspace.

“Then you recall that no matter her efforts, the marriage still fell apart,” Rey says.

“The more you tamp down a secret, the more it will consume you—here, let me unclasp that. I’ll send it to your room with a pair of slippers for tonight’s festivities.”

“I appreciate your kindness, Leia.”

“It is you whose kindness must be appreciated,” Leia admonishes. “You who puts up with my son day after day, guarding his life. He’s a difficult boy, my Ben. I’m surprised you don’t take a swing at him yourself with your lightsword.”

He should take offense at Rey’s ringing laughter, but instead it sets his heart thrumming. “There is no passion, there is—”

“Only serenity, I know. Luke used to quote the damned code whenever I snapped at him, just to spite me. You wouldn’t believe how many Jedi misinterpret the codes that guide them.”

“Senator?” Rey’s caution is palpable, her retreat to formality instinctive.

“Centuries before the Jedi served the Republic as peacekeepers, they studied more than diplomacy and saber forms at their temples. They actually read the scriptures that guide their order. The ancient Jedi brought balance to the galaxy while creating balance in their personal lives. Many understood that adopting rigid codes created imbalances of passion, vacuums of desire. They sought balance according to the dictates of their consciousnesses.

“Attachments were not always forbidden, Rey.” Now it’s Leia’s turn to sigh, the weight of a thousand unlived lives etched her forehead. “Perhaps if the Jedi Order had permitted them, Padmé would be here to lend you the dress herself.”

When Rey finally responds, Ben hears echoes of his words in hers. “Perhaps she couldn’t have escaped her destiny.”

From the balcony, Ben braces himself for his mother’s scathing reply, then relaxes as she conceals her disagreement in one word: “Perhaps.” Ever the politician, steering conversations from asteroid fields toward smoother skies, which is why her hasty dive back into dangerous airspace bewilders him. “Luke found someone, you know.”

“Master Luke?” Rey exclaims. “But he—when did—who is it?”

“Mara Jade has been gone for many years. But Luke succeeded with her where our parents did not. In each other, they found balance.”

“How can you believe in balance between partners after you and Han separated?”

“Han and I,” Leia says wryly, “couldn’t see past this bed. All the passion in the world burns out without fuel to feed it. Fuel wasn’t in short supply” —a rueful chuckle— “but fire consumes everything in its wake. One day we woke up to a scorched landscape and wondered what was left.”

“Do you still—”

“Love him? Like a pilot loves the sky.”

“Then why—”

“I wasn’t built for the sky,” she says, her quiet vulnerability crawling across Ben’s neck. “Han is a shooting star, and who am I to pin him to the ground?”

“I see,” Rey replies, although from her tone, it’s clear she doesn’t and that draws a cautious smile from Ben. He should leap from the balcony, move on before he’s accidentally discovered, but the time for reason has passed after waking up in her arms.

“We had our moments. But according to Padmé’s writings, even monsters have theirs. True partnership demands an equal exchange of energy, effort, ideas.”

“With any exchange of energy, some is lost.”

“Better shared and lost than hoarded and discarded.”

A clanging sound echoes distantly; Ben strains to hear Rey’s reply. “Senator Solo believes it’s not for us to decide whether to share. He claims our futures are fixed.”

“The Force would suggest otherwise. Ben’s always wanted what he can’t have. Maybe this time…”

The clatter grows as C-3PO bustles into the bedchamber. “Oh, there you are, Mistress Leia, Madam Jedi.” His golden head swivels, examining the room and falling on the sliver of sunlight pouring through the window drapes. “Master Ben?” he chirps, gesticulating wildly as he beelines for the curtains.

Rey whips around at his name, searching but finding no one.

“Only us, Threepio,” Leia says mildly, but Ben notes her furtive glances toward the balcony. Karking C-3PO, always running his karking mouth, almost blowing his cover. As he tenses in preparation for discovery that doesn’t arrive, he fantasizes about stealing Rey’s lightsaber. One stroke and the nosy protocol droid would collapse in a silent smoking heap, never again to blow Ben’s cover.

“Do forgive me, Mistress Leia,” the protocol droid says. “I have been searching for you everywhere!”

Leia nods. “Excuse me, Rey. You have a perimeter to sweep and I have a great hall to supervise. I look forward to seeing you tonight in your new gown.” Her tone brooks no refusal—Ben knows better than to argue when she sounds like that. It seems like his good sense has rubbed off onto Rey for once, for she swallows any protests and marches out of Ben’s room, footsteps receding down the hall.

Notwithstanding Threepio’s bumbling interruptions, Ben might still make it out undiscovered. Perhaps he won’t have to borrow Rey’s lightsaber after all. Then his mother sweeps open the curtains to the balcony and catches him guiltily straightening from his crouch. To her credit, she says nothing, but the twinkle in her eyes hints at withheld mirth.

Enough to pull Ben’s face into a scowl and his hands into fists. “Mother—”

“You needn’t make excuses, Ben.” Her laser-bright glee is positively smug. “Your fate has been sealed since the moment Rey accepted this assignment.”

“You know nothing,” he hisses, but the protest reeks of fear at his discovery more than righteous indignation.

As the recipient of Ben’s scowl, fierce enough to make his political opponents cower across the Senate chamber, Leia barely shrugs. “You can fight it, or you can harness the spark between you two and light the stars. You’re a Skywalker,” she says sadly. “We all burn out someday.”

“There is no spark—”

“By the way,” she says, cutting off his excuses and withdrawing a creased letter from her flowing blue sleeve. “You dropped this.”

He snatches the letter from her, hating the way her hand hangs in the air after it empties. “You know about the journal and Anakin’s letter. Why didn’t you tell me?”

Ben’s theories disintegrate in nanoseconds once she cocks her head and fixes him with a knowing stare and a hint of a smile. “That’s not Anakin’s letter. Don’t you know? Your father wrote it.”

Then she sweeps the curtains closed, Threepio babbling at her back, leaving Ben to digest the futility of it all: his fight with Rey, his quest to understand the past, his fight against his father’s nature. The revelation kindles in Ben a yearning to dissolve into the marble balcony railing, or commandeer the family cruiser and fly back to Coruscant. But Rey would tear the estate apart hunting for him in his absence. Sworn to protect him though she may be, he wouldn’t put it past her to sock him upon his return for all the trouble he’d cause by disappearing. Better to stay and ignore the pointed looks his mother will send him all night long.

Punching the railing only bloodies his knuckles, but takes the edge off his humiliation. Fresh in his nostrils, the copper tang grounds him, a reminder of the afternoon in the meadow with Rey. The same throbbing heat that conquered his body then concentrates in his knuckles now. It flares as he flexes, subsiding as he rips open the door and stalks into his chambers.

His knuckles will scab over before guests invade Varykino tonight. They will bruise and heal soon, bruise and heal a thousand times over before disintegrating into dust, always reaching for what he can’t quite grasp. Although he scoffs at Rey’s fervency that the future remains in motion, although his mind clings to determinism like a Jedi to her saber, his hands wish for an undecided future: one where Jedi vows dissolve under familiar fingers, and public servants shed their commitments like snakeskins. One where he can be Ben and she can be Rey, no Jedi or senators, just four hands and a heat that can withstand time’s cooling spell.


	10. For the Better

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After Leia reveals her secret to Han, they celebrate.

_5 ABY_

* * *

He drags her from the New Republic Anniversary celebration as soon as the first fireworks brush the clouds. Under the purple and yellow glimmers, Han and Leia dash for their water speeder, urging the captain to break every maritime speed record on Naboo as she spirits them back to Varykino. They hardly make it halfway to the estate before Leia grabs Han, pressing him into the speeder’s cushions. He tasted like Corellian whiskey, smoky maple at the front and cinnamon at the finish.

Tomorrow. She’ll tell him about her pregnancy tomorrow. Tonight is for glittering green rockets, sky blue sheets, and an overdue release in her husband’s arms. They barely fall asleep once the indigo night bleeds into a midnight morning, once the speeder has docked and their clothes are reduced to a pile at the foot of their bed.

She stirs in those early morning hours, earlier than the pelikki that chirp away the stars and usher in the sun. A blanket of fog nestles around her ancestral home, rendering the unfamiliar buildings somehow more familiar by erasing their sharp edges and curved domes. So different from her childhood home on Alderaan, the Naberrie estate might have been Leia’s home if Padmé had survived to raise her children.

The fog rolls through the open windows, luring Leia outside with the promise of cold relief from yesterday’s humidity. She slips from bed and into her lavender silk robe, grabbing her mother’s journal as she pads through the empty halls and out onto the same terrace that Padmé described in an entry about quiet vows exchanged under the watchful gaze of a local Pontifex.

So this is where it began, the destruction of the galaxy. And its rebuilding, Leia reminds herself, picturing Luke’s tousled grin and his green saber, scraps of her beloved Rebellion waging war through Endor’s forests and a dwindling squadron of X-wings reducing a Death Star to dust.

Ignoring the durasteel table and chairs tucked near the terrace door, she ventures to the ornate stone railing, thicker than she is wide, and hops atop it, letting her legs dangle over the sand below. Here the breeze whispers secrets through her robe that she can’t parse. Sitting where her parents married, reading the words Padmé wrote, strengthens the connection to their spirits that has eternally lingered in the back of her mind.

Since childhood, she’s had a mother in Breha Organa; that has always been enough for her until she reads of Padmé’s joy in sensing two spirits in her womb where she expected one. Breha Organa has been enough until Leia’s reality, discovered mere days prior, hits her square in the gut: she’s about to have a child of her own. Suddenly she misses the sad phantom she barely remembers, whose journals only sharpen the loss more acutely. She’d trade every handwritten page for a note written just for her.

Right then Leia swears to give her unborn child the parents she wishes could materialize from Varykino’s shadowed past: a diligent mother and a father in love with the both of them. The infinitesimally brightening sky, the shadowed gnarled trees, the fog skimming the lake and shrouding the klaa fish splashing below: it all fades as she pictures a dark-haired child scampering across the terrace and into her waiting arms, Han watching with a smirk, joy radiating from his frame.

Together they’ve brought an empire to its knees, rebuilt a republic from myths, and managed to survive the scrutiny of it all. One unplanned child pales in comparison. Besides, they have already talked about starting a family someday.

Once a sliver of the sun glides into view, she yawns her way back to their bed, wriggling under the covers and dozing until Han begins to stir hours later. Kissing him awake gets Han grinning sleepily and calling for them to postpone breakfast so he can feast on her, but Leia waves him off. There will be time for that later.

When she tells him she’s pregnant, he simply squints. “Look, Leia, no jokes today, not with this hangover.”

“It’s no joke,” Leia beams. He laughs, but his hands tremble in hers.

“A kid,” he repeats, shaking his head, then burying it in her chest. “We’re going to have a kid. A little princess.”

Were Leia far enough along, her protruding stomach might leap at this declaration. Han moves from hiding in her chest to kissing his way down her stomach, more effective than words in soothing Leia’s soul. Abruptly she realizes how much she had been craving his approval over the past few days, waiting for the right moment to tell him.

Breakfast forgotten, they celebrate their good fortune with a repeat performance of last night. Han is gentler now, caressing her belly as he works his way lower. Sunshine streams through sky blue curtains, highlighting Leia’s hands as they seek purchase in his hair, which curls into his eyes. Tangled together like this, Leia watches everything fade: her sleepless night, her concerns, her excuses. In his arms, she finds home.

Reluctantly they pull apart after swimming in stars. Like usual, Han extricates himself from her hold, tucking her in before draining his flask and withdrawing to the ‘fresher to clean up. Uncharacteristically tender, he runs a finger along her jaw, lingering a beat too long. As Leia matches the gesture, her fingers pull away wet from his cheeks.

His uncustomary tenderness only solidifies Leia’s vision from the terrace. Their child will have everything she couldn’t. Yawning, she allows her eyelids to droop shut. Breakfast can wait for Han to clean himself. Until then, she’ll let herself rest. In her dreams, their family of three spins in the meadow at the waterfall’s edge.

* * *

Brilliant oranges and pinks streak through the balcony windows as Leia’s groggy eyes drift open. She hasn’t realized the toll the festivities and the pregnancy have taken on her body. Since Han let her sleep uninterrupted, she feels lighter, more refreshed. Despite her knotted neck and growling stomach, Leia shrugs off the blanket cocoon and hunts for her husband.

A quick scan reveals he’s departed their room, so Leia wraps herself in the lavender silk robe and patters outside to the terrace. No Han. She checks the Room of Morning Mists, the fireplace lounge, even the stables. But Han is nowhere to be found.

She locates Nandi pruning the vines that climb across the villa’s balconies. “I thought you knew,” the caretaker croaks, startled. “General Solo departed for home this morning.”

Although her throat dries like a moisture farm on Tatooine, Leia manages to reply, “Of course.” Knowing that Nandi can see her prevents Leia from hiking up her robe and scrambling down the stairs to the dock to witness the empty dock herself. So she forces herself to take measured steps to conceal her panic. When the dock creeps into view, no water speeder in sight, Leia reminds herself she has survived losses more crushing than this. Mustering every ounce of her willpower, she marches herself back to her room. Then, behind closed doors, she lets out a scream fit to shatter glass.

Han’s uncharacteristic tenderness this morning, his hesitation and tears—Leia’s been had by a scoundrel who never claimed to be someone different. She knows who he is—has known since the day he yanked her from the Imperial holding cell—so his betrayal shouldn’t level her. Still, it brings her to her knees, rips the air from her lungs, dislodges her airway and cracks her skull until all she hears is a ringing “I know.”

Frantically she scours the room for any trace of her husband. She finds him in the hygiene kit strewn across the ‘fresher counter, in the empty monogrammed silver flask perched on the bedside table, in the wrinkled bow tie crumpled at the foot of their bed. Even her mother’s butter-brown journal is the color of Han’s eyes at sunrise. The words Leia found so much solace in early that morning now leave her cold and lonely. Her mother endured obsession, secrecy, but never abandonment. Anakin never would have abandoned her and their unborn children.

But Han is not a monster or a Jedi, just a scared man. So Leia is abandoned, future visions obliterated like her home planet, Alderaan. Once she completes her third lap around the chamber—which felt so big when they first landed on Naboo, but closes in on her now that she’s alone—she summons all the force she can muster and compels herself to sit still. Pacing won’t solve this.

So she sinks into the bed, cocoons herself back in the quilt that Han so gently had wrapped around her body only hours prior. As she reaches to fluff her pillow, her hands brush paper. From under her pillow, she pulls out a thick creamy parchment embossed with the Naberrie family crest. A piece of stationary from the half-used set stored in the writing desk.

 _I can’t do this anymore_ , it says in a scribble so familiar it splits her heart in two. Desperate for more, Leia flips the letter over, but the page is empty save for the five words driving her under the covers. Eventually she’ll come out. A princess can’t hide forever. Yet at this moment she can’t stand another sleepless night at Varykino.

She stuffs Han’s confession into the desk drawer, along with her mother’s journal. Leia has no need for empty words from ghosts.


	11. All The Way Down

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As Anakin begins to slip through her fingers, Padmé must reckon with their secrets.

_19 BBY_

* * *

She dismisses the servants weeks after her marriage. Annie’s schedule is too unpredictable, their time together a firecracker with a fuse too short for planning. Or warning. Now Padmé must cook and clean without help from Varykino’s faithful stewards, the ones who cared for her from birth.

It’s easier this way. No need for lies when she and Annie are all alone in the dark. If he notices the calluses springing up on her fingerpads, he never mentions them. Just lets her rake prayers down his back and hides the scratches with black leather that reflects her blank stare come dawn.

It starts small: a crumbling brick stair from the dock. A zaela tree blooming far beyond the confines of its terrace pot. A scuffed railing here, a chipped marble column there. Clouds roll in from the water and engulf the estate more frequently than Padmé remembers from childhood. Wind blows sand from the shore to the terrace. It crunches underfoot.

As the war against the Separatists intensifies, Annie calls for these secret rendezvous less frequently, sometimes giving her only a few hours’ notice. No matter the contents of her schedule—a bill, a ball, a rare moment unchaperoned—Padmé always meets him under the Durosian marble columns of Varykino, eager to leap into his arms and remove her politician’s facade in the privacy of his embrace.

Initially, Annie’s equally as eager for respite, claiming it in her arms and between her thighs. What he finds, however, does not dim the hunger in his eyes. He does little to conceal it, a crisp rage that consumes Padmé’s energy and spits back chaos. Where there were grassy afternoons borne on sunlight and laughter, there are now silences snapped and stretched taut again. Where there were meals fueled by flirtatious debates and shared fruit, there are surly diatribes about the Jedi High Council’s lack of foresight. Smoldering glances replaced by furtive resentment, innocent prattle supplanted by guarded riddles.

They still make love on stolen nights, flung together on borrowed time. Sometimes he grips her hips so hard they bruise. Padmé tells herself not to flinch as his bones carve into hers, tells herself she likes it, tells herself she wants it. There are no servants around to see her lie, and Annie is too far gone to notice.

Despite her political inclinations, Padmé’s not in the business of lying to herself, so she writes the truth in her journal even if her fingers tremble. _I had a dream, which wasn’t all a dream. I was cursed to wander eternal space, the sun extinguished and stars rayless, my neck tingling with phantom pain. I tell him he has nothing to fear from his dreams, yet cower at the thought of mine. But telling him the truth would break him. He’s barely holding on as is._

He retreats into himself, an angry shadow hardly resembling the outspoken podracer who carved his heart into japor. Padmé pulls at his retreating figure, yanks him inch by unyielding inch into the sunlight, but he is no longer warm. She used to grow cold without him, but that was before she spent nights fighting to be at his side and mornings fighting to find comfort in his arms. With each attempt, her fingers grow tired, her world grows colder, her sunshine dims.

Becoming a wife, Padmé discovers, is much like becoming a queen: her throne, a bed; her subject, her husband. Anakin believes that in swearing their marriage vows to each other, they forsook their external duties. Padmé knows at their wedding, they simply shouldered more responsibilities. Instead of trading the galaxy for his hand, she simply opened her palms wider, covenanting to spread herself thin.

Although she has governed the whole of Naboo, her husband remains her most difficult constituent to please. His fair and foul moods sweep in capriciously with the Lake Country’s fog. She weathers them all. A fast learner, she paints her face white to conceal terror and her cheeks rosy with adoration. He doesn’t notice, not when his thoughts are directed inward to an all-consuming grief. The desperation he fucks into her does little to warm her from the secrets freezing her soul.

Cannibalizing herself to fit her role is her ultimate duty, the enduring legacy of Padmé Amidala. Between queendom, Senatorship, and marriage, she’s shattered from glass into ice and sand. Anakin would hate her rough edges if he felt them, but she locks them inside where he never bothers to reach anymore with his mind. When she prods his consciousness with her own, she tries to impart the sense of security, the thrill of infinite possibility, that their first morning together on the terrace brought her. He laps up the comfort she proffers—mouth on thigh, teeth on skin—without remembering to reserve some for her. The bread is gone, the jam has spilled, and Padmé has no more yeast left to make a new loaf rise from the scraps.

But then something sparks hard in her belly one evening, punching the air from her lungs and leaving her gaping under three white hot moons. There’s no twitching or tumbling, like her mother described when a young Padmé pressed her hands against the bump that became Sola. Only a tug against her consciousness, too indistinct to be Anakin, stops the terrace from spinning under her feet. Cold marble underfoot tethers her to reality. Although she had snuck onto the balcony to escape her husband’s fevered thrashing, she is not alone. The lake laps at Varykino’s stone foundation and Padmé marvels at how her world can shift in the space between waves.

Anakin is gone by the time she wakes the next morning.

She tells him when they next meet, cloaked by marble columns in Coruscant, forgetting to conceal her enthusiasm and flourishing in his resulting excitement. He grins, genuine for the first time in ages, but she doesn’t miss the darkness that strikes before his smile lands.

In weeks to come, he carves more time for her from his war efforts than Padmé deems wise, but he reassures her that he is both a general and father now. Long hours rim his eyes, shaving his torso to stone and his hands to furnaces. He burns himself to be with her, but she no longer hungers for his heat. The children in her womb keep the galaxy’s chill at bay.

They fly to Varykino less, settling for clandestine meetings in Padmé’s Coruscant apartments. She misses the lake, smooth as glass this time of year. The waterfalls thrum harder under the snowmelt, the grass stretches to the sky, and Padmé vows to take her children to visit her home at this time next year. Then she wonders if she’ll have no choice but to hide them away there, if they’ll grow up alongside the ghosts of a Jedi and a Senator fighting entropy.

“Would you rather let the whole galaxy burn?” she asks Anakin as he rails against the secrecy shrouding their union.

The darkness in his eyes dares her to look away, but she holds steady as he declares, “Anything to keep our secret—our family—safe.”

She writes it down, every last word tucked into her journal, between drafting and abandoning a speech arguing against Chancellor Palpatine’s consolidation of power. She thinks of this exchange when Anakin jolts upright, screaming in her arms, the Republic army’s power at his fingertips but powerless to stop his dreams from exploding across the stars.

Terrified by visions of her death, Anakin cannot sleep through the night. Although Padmé soothes him by morning’s light, she grows uneasy as he grows more possessive. So it has come to this, a fleet of the top Republic med droids at her disposal countered by a secret too large to breach. Seeking out preventative care would give them away. That doesn’t stop Anakin from hunting for guarantees of her safety. Where he searches, he will not say.

With time, the twins’ heat also dulls in her belly. Padmé sinks into a nothingness so thick it threatens to suck her under. She cannot disguise the distance in her eyes as devotion. Anakin mistakes it for fear and pulls her tighter into his orbit, no thought for the strength of his grip. He’s choking her out and she’s gulping for release and it turns out he’s been right the whole time: their union reaps destruction no matter the love they sow.

All along she’s known it, but she always imagined destruction as flames engulfing her head to toe without the power to sear away Anakin’s touch. She never anticipated destruction to smother her quietly, neutrally, a trillion lake-sand grains burying her body as the last of her warmth snuffs out, leaving no energy to fight for their love.

That’s why she startles one night after burrowing into bed, her fingers resting anywhere but her stomach. The recognizable snort of Anakin’s speeder jolts her from the liminal world between dreams and darkness. On her Coruscant balcony, he holds a hand out like he did years earlier as he tried pulling her atop a shaak and tugging at its mind to keep it from bucking them off.

Tonight Padmé’s back aches. Her feet throb. But she reaches for him anyway. It’s been so long since she’s felt anything, since her life had any semblance of order.

He pilots the ship to Naboo, touching down on Varykino’s private dock; Padmé nearly weeps when her toes touch sand. Hate it though he may, it reminds her of home. The sun rises and sets, and rises and sets again, before he talks of the Jedi and the responsibilities awaiting them both on Coruscant. He speaks of Obi-Wan’s caution and Chancellor Palpatine’s praise, but Padmé hushes him with a kiss.

“Please, Annie.” He softens to molten glass in her sculptor’s hands. The look he fixes her with burns darker than their first night at Varykino, but hungry nonetheless. “We have so little time together, the two of us.” His smolder drifts to her stomach, and the resulting grin is too private, clearly meant for her eyes alone, that she refuses to write about it later. Were she to attempt describing it, her journal would catch fire.

He does not immediately unclasp her traveling cloak, push down her gown and show her the stars on the terrace where they once spread jam on bread. Again he proffers his hand, and again she reaches for it without knowing his intent. Tonight all she knows is that he loves her, and that she loves him, and that certainty sparks through her veins. The twins in her stomach leap in reply.

When he pulls her close to his chest and starts swaying, a laugh bubbles loose from her throat. They are dancing, a Jedi High Councillor and his queen of steel. Padmé’s not sure if she’ll ever let go.

“I didn’t know they taught Jedi to dance,” she whispers, relishing the smirk it generates.

“They don’t, Senator.” He twirls her, one vicious-fast movement that would’ve knocked her off her feet were he not there to guide her the whole way through. “But my reflexes are extraordinary.”

This is the Annie she fell in love with—her lungs can expand to full capacity now that he’s returned. She laughs in relief and at his smile. “Why don’t you show me?”


	12. A Million Little Times

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Three generations of Naberries converge under a sunset.

_A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away_

* * *

Leia refuses to leave their bed, even though Han’s smoky-cinnamon scent clings to the pillows. If she lays still long enough, her thoughts give way to dreams, and only in dreams can she take a breath without feeling her stomach pulse unhappily. A reminder of Han, and the child he left behind.

Old Nandi brings her soups and breads, fruits and sweets, leaving tray after untouched tray by Leia’s bedside. None of it tempts her, but the caretaker advises her to eat. “For the child,” she says, stroking Leia’s hair, the braids matted into tangles.

Acknowledging Nandi, eating the food, would drag Leia from the darkness in which she pretends to subsist. So she screws her eyes shut and seeks refuge in sleep. It comes to her after hours, or maybe days, but Leia’s nothing if not persistent.

In her dreams, she and Han pick up where they paused the night before he bolted: running late for the New Republic Anniversary, stripping off more formalwear than they manage to put on. Threepio interrupts them a second time, tapping Han’s shoulder until the couple separates.

“Sir, I really must—”

“Can it, Threepio,” Han hisses. While she should protest, Leia winds her arms tighter around his neck, finding his suggestion quite agreeable. After all, how many nights will they have like this? Hundreds, thousands, Leia tells herself, their infinite future unfurling at their feet. But how many sunsets will they spend by the lake, how many nights will they spend sparkling under Naboo’s three moons? How long will it be just them?

So she lets Han shoo away Threepio, giggles at the droid’s indignant protests, and leans in when Han pulls her close. His racing heartbeat belies his lazy grin as he bends to kiss her, first her mouth and then her neck. Arms coil around her waist, steering her backwards till her thighs skim the bed.

She leans into him to keep herself upright. “We’ll be late for the opening dance!”

“I’m not much of a dancer, Your Worship.” His smile indicates he knows his lines by heart. Leia matches him word for word.

“I can’t have a scruffy scoundrel like you bumbling around the ballroom.” She slides her palm up his chest. “Allow me to teach you.”

Without any prompting, his hands assume their positions: one clasped in hers and another resting between her shoulder blades, dipping downwards on occasion, one brush enough to stall her pulse.

“Anything for you, Princess,” he says low and certain, tongue grazing her ear. “Allow me to show you how we do it on Corellia.” Wrapped in Han’s embrace, wrinkling her gown and loosening her braids, Leia thinks this is what her father meant when he swore to let the whole galaxy burn if it meant keeping his family whole.

Han draws her closer until their hips collide, their legs intertwine, and their breath becomes one shared cycle. They spin like this as golden pheasant chirps drift in from the open window on the lake breeze and drown out their desire.

Leia wakes weeping, and screams into his pillow until she grows hoarse. Then she sits up, mechanically devours the plate of food closest to her bed, and stands under the shower while the ‘fresher fills with steam.

* * *

A rap on his door draws Ben from the ‘fresher before he finishes straightening his bow tie. Must be his mother or Threepio. Or Rey, although he doubts she’ll approach him tonight. While she’s contractually obligated to protect him, she can fulfill those duties from a distance. After his outburst this afternoon, he expects nothing less as he opens the door.

But there Rey stands, habitually defying his every expectation.

He doesn’t recognize her at first, all bared shoulders and silk clinging to curves he could only imagine under coarse wool. Her customary three buns have been brushed and woven into half a ponytail that cascades down her back. No leather belt, no lightsaber on display, just a dress hanging by a collar and a blush that spreads down her spine.

Bathed in a sunset, Rey sways uncertainly before him. “I know these aren’t my robes,” she says, fingering the silk skirt absentmindedly. “But I can still defend you in this… antique.” As she hikes the skirt up past her knee to reveal a lightsaber strapped to her thigh, Ben can’t exhale, can’t swallow, can’t do anything but gape as if he was born to orbit her, an ordinary planet graced by her sunlight.

“Don’t stare, say something,” she snaps. “I know I look ridiculous, I told your mother I’m not made for this—”

“You are,” he says, for how can he tell her that she looks better than his dreams? How can he tell her that she is made for both warriors’ tunics and queens’ gowns, with hands strong enough to protect them both and delicate enough to slip between his?

“Well, you don’t look like a nerfherder yourself.”

He chuckles too loud; it ricochets between marble columns and dyes the tips of his ears scarlet. “Speak like that to my colleagues tonight. Please.”

Instead of echoing his laugh, Rey frowns. Without layers of ill-fitting fabric to hide behind, her hunched shoulders catches Ben’s attention. Sure enough, she’s chewing through her lip. “You’re worried,” he notes. “Don’t be. They’re a bunch of pompous space slugs.”

The twinkle in her eye hits him faster than Andoan wine. “Even though you mock them, you’ll fit right in.” She adjusts her opalescent collar, scrutinizing an invisible snag on her bodice. “I won’t. I’m nobody.”

“Not to me.” He closes the gap between them before he realizes he’s moving. Up close, freckles materialize on her cheeks where none were earlier. A reminder of their sunny afternoon strolls. When her eyes snap to his, Ben Solo realizes Rey’s not the only one marked by their time together.

For a moment he fancies she’ll reply, but she fidgets with her gown. Nothing about her is soft, all sharp edges not worn down by sand. He leans in anyway, refusing to pull away because in the sharp lines of her body, he finds a gentle peace.

Finally, she pulls away. “I have something to tell you.” Her insistence has returned, her endearing drive to uncover every mystery and hold its truth in the palm of her hand. In their hours apart today, Ben has missed it more than he’ll divulge.

He answers with a smile, crooked but real. “I have to tell you something, too.”

“Ben, your mother knows. About the journal, Padmé’s marriage, everything.”

“I know,” he says dismissively, for he must quickly make her understand the letter’s true history and with it, his remorse for driving her away.

“How?”

“It doesn’t matter.” Her eyes narrow suspiciously. He pushes ahead. “The letter isn’t Anakin’s.”

Her suspicion fades to shock. “What?”

“It’s my father’s.”

As her eyes widen, Ben recalls his mother’s words to Rey earlier that afternoon. So does Rey. “The scorched landscape,” she murmurs. “So that’s what she meant.”

Ben hums in assent, and Rey shakes her head.

“Threepio was right, you were there!”

The shrug he gives her is one he’s seen his father give his mother hundreds of times. It rolls through his muscles involuntarily. Thankfully she can’t hold her frown for long as strains of a vioflute float through the hall.

“We should hurry,” she says without moving towards the great hall. “Your guests are waiting.”

How can she not tell he’d allow the lake swallow up the villa to get an extra standard hour with her? “We have time. We don’t have to face them right now.”

“If Leia asks why you’re late—”

“Dancing lessons.”

She laughs. “What? You can’t—”

“You don’t know how to dance. I’ll teach you.”

As he holds out a hand, her glee disappears. “Don’t mock me.”

“I’m not.” He can’t withdraw his offer, not while his heart hangs between them. “Join me in a waltz, Rey.”

Palms cool, she twines her fingers into his. If she notices his pulse pounding through his jacket, she doesn’t mention it. He drums a beat between her shoulder blades, then begins to guide her through the steps, their feet parting and reuniting, mirroring each other across an expanse too foreign to cross.

Once she stops holding her breath between every step, Rey relaxes into his touch. “Do you still wonder what really happened to your grandparents?”

“Always,” he acknowledges. “But we’ll never know the truth.”

“Know the truth, no,” she says, gripping his arm tighter as he increases their tempo. “But we can feel it. They danced here once, like us. I feel it.”

No tingling spine, warm shiver, or ghostly Force confirms her words, but somewhere deep in his bones, Ben feels the truth of it, too. “A long time ago.”

“I wonder if she felt like this,” she murmurs, forehead wrinkled in concentration. Every drop of his Naberrie blood throbs in confirmation. They continue to rotate, twin moons revolving around a planet.

Temporal, fleeting, her smile saddens. “Am I waltzing?”

“Yes, sweetheart,” he says, an echo of a dance sprawling between space and time, caught between the stone walls of Varykino and cursed to continue until the lake drains and the stars wink out into nothingness.

When he leads her in a spin, her sunset skirts take flight. When they twist hard against her legs, she steps forward and leans into his chest. Gradually their feet slow to a crawl, more shuffle than waltz as Ben soaks up the pressure of her head against his thudding heart. Then she abruptly pulls away.

“Rey?”

“That was unprofessional of me, Senator,” she says, hardening from the clip of her speech to the set of her jaw. Again he reaches for her, crossing the chasm threatening to rupture between them.

“Stay with me.” A command, a plea, a prayer. “Please.”

“I can’t.” Suddenly wistful, Rey gestures to their chambers, to the diary buried in the drawer from whence it came. “They couldn’t.”

His hands clutch at her shoulders. This time she doesn’t move away. “We don’t have to lie like they did. I see a future, you by my side. The jam is mixed. We can’t unstir it now.”

Her smile is all sun, luminous and trembling. “When we danced, I saw their past. Just the shape of it, red and ruined.”

“Kill the past,” he snaps. “Our future is still in motion, like you say.”

Down the hall, a clamor of guests’ voices rise and fall. She flinches at the reminder of the gala awaiting them. “What will they say?”

Rey’s a sight to behold in the borrowed gown, all of her walls crumbling, so fiercely gentle that Ben’s throat catches. But a relieved laugh catches in his throat, too, burbling desperately as her question settles around them. Years of scrutiny—open whispers and thinly veiled sneers at his heritage, his policies, his lunatic uncle and his ruffian father—two failed assassination attempts that drove him into hiding—have rendered Ben immune to criticism. He’d torch the shreds of his reputation for a chance at peace by Rey’s side. A chance he thought her Jedi vows made slim. Yet all that stands between them is her fear of what the galaxy thinks?

Ben draws her close, leans in with a shrug, and winks.

Rey’s mouth drops.

“Let them talk.” Then he seals her mouth with his, a final stirring of jam, an irreversible exchange of heat.

His lips move clumsily, half a beat behind hers as he learns her rhythm, then matches it. Kissing Rey is feeling not only her cheeks under his fingertips, the press of her hips against his, but also the life radiating from her body, the ripples it gives off into the ether engulfing them. His body ripples in reply, two beings becoming one in the Force. Order forming from chaos, Rey might say were her mouth free. But Ben knows they’re spiraling from their ordered roles into splintered rules and fractured expectations, disorder as everything must be. In her embrace, he welcomes it.

* * *

In Anakin’s embrace, Padmé welcomes the sunset instead of dreading it. There will be time for a thousand stolen kisses, time for Annie to cradle their children in his arms and show them how to fly. Time for family breakfasts on the terrace, time for stories told around the fire, for picnics by the falls and bantha rides through the grass. Padmé will wait until their erratic collisions take shape, until their bodies only orbit each other without pulls to outside loyalties. For now, it is enough to sway with her husband at the edge of the lake, sun bleeding into water and Annie bleeding into Padmé and the bump in her stomach melting all their sand to glass. Here they are safe. Here they are home.

* * *

A familiar roar draws Leia from the safe pages of her book. It startles Old Nandi, who has been companionably reading by her side every afternoon for the past several days. Before Nandi can retrieve her dropped book, the sitting room door swings open to reveal Chewbacca and a sheepish Han in tow. Vest torn, hair erratic, forehead wrinkled, but whole. Here.

Surely this is another dream. But Chewie rumbles hello and pulls Leia into an all-too-solid hug that leaves her spluttering for air. When the Wookiee finally pulls away with another yelp, Leia doesn’t move. Neither does her husband, his furrowed brow thrown in sharp relief by the sunset pouring through the bay window. His letter hangs between them.

They examine each other from across the room till Chewie growls in Han’s direction. That gets him talking.

“Look, Leia,” he says. After worrying aloud to Nandi over the past few weeks that she’d never hear his voice again, Leia resents how her pulse quickens as he continues. “I’m no good at this husband thing.”

“I know,” she huffs, willing herself to stay rooted to the carpet. Chewie yowls in agreement. Old Nandi folds her arms as she narrows her eyes in Han’s direction.

“Don’t everyone deny that at once.” Although his eyes crinkle, Leia knows he is well and truly nervous, a sight rarer than a Hutt strangled by his own chains. He steps forward haltingly, once, twice. “I got scared, okay? This ain’t a situation I can shoot my way out of. You know I don’t know how to be a parent.”

“Neither do I.” Her shrug is icy, but it does little to stop him from advancing.

“I used to think something inside me was broken…”

“Oh, shut up, you scruffy flyboy,” she grumbles and closes the gap between them, nestling into the crook of his arm, sweat stains and all. He clutches at her desperately, a man unmoored from gravity and feeling the empty maw of space tug at his feet. Han is back; their child will know him. Her sigh of relief is palpable.

But her muscles will never fully relax, not after this betrayal. Han may have returned, but Leia knows that by taking him back into her arms, she condemns herself to a lifetime of peering over her shoulder, craning into the future and bracing for another break that might never come.

As orange clouds lay to rest the dying sun below the horizon, as Chewie roars an excuse about the Falcon in a bid to give the reunited lovers privacy, as Han’s hands grow restless at her waist and scavenge a path down her hips and through the layers, Leia fixates on the brown leather journal, a sentinel bearing witness to the degeneration of their union from order into chaos, from trust into terror.

It’s etched into her bones, Leia reasons as she makes Han moan, the motions mechanical as her mind hurtles through faraway galaxies, past dimming suns and increasingly random collisions. It’s burned into her blood, a heritage spawned from forbidden desire and unplanned secrecy. Her mother made the same choice to sacrifice peace of mind for love’s glow, and when it ran cold, it reduced her to a shell in an unmarked grave.

The friction of two bodies rubbing together, more apology than passion in every stroke, generates enough heat that evening to stave off the impending distance that will soon permeate their lives and transform Leia’s camouflaged dread into naked frustration. Until their passion cools the way of stars winking out in moonless skies, they will strain to replicate the motions that used to send them spinning out into bliss.

* * *

In Rey’s arms, time unspools before Ben. He sees her twinkling across the great hall, wrapped up in his sheets—tonight, years from now, he cannot tell. Diamond-bright images, too fast to swallow and too fractured to make whole: stolen kisses, illicit embraces, two fighters streaking across the sky. Red porridge, cooling tea, warming wine: disorder out of disorder, unchanging and unchangeable. Suns extinguishing, meteors colliding, mixing as they go.

He kisses her again, and thinks of his grandmother, of the warmth she sought from Anakin and the fire that burnt them both from the inside out, no energy left to recover their ghosts.

In Rey’s arms, understanding flashes like red and blue lightning under Ben’s skin. Journal entries he poured over transform from ink and paper into lips and soul. Like his mother and his grandmother, Ben gives himself over willingly to the fire awaiting him, heat death be damned. From a sunset so long ago, for a future still blossoming with possibilities, Padmé’s words slide in on the last rays of sun: _Perhaps we are born to spark and flame and burn up the world around us until everything grows cool._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A million thank yous for sticking with this fic until the end! If you're craving more bittersweet multigenerational Skywalker feels, you can check out this [ playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4N7IcVKxklByIL32NwOkJC?si=PQ9YRHQ-S7eNnpa-7nsQCA) (that has a song to match every chapter) and this [ moodboard](https://reylofanfictionanthology.tumblr.com/image/629914056337375232) created by the wonderful RFFA mods, who hosted another brilliant event this year. :)


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